Sam Worthington Reveals His ‘Perfect Love Story’ with Zoe Saldaña in Avatar Gets ‘Split Apart’ in Sequel ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ picks up soon after a devastating loss in 2022’s ‘The Way of Water’

By Jack Smart Published on July 30, 2025 06:48PM EDT

Avatar star Sam Worthington spoke to Empire Magazine about the upcoming sequel, Fire and Ash. The actor teased a “division” in the central relationship between Jake and Neytiri, his and Zoe Saldaña’s characters “Everybody in this movie is reacting from a place of trauma,” revealed filmmaker James Cameron Sam Worthington is teasing a devastating “division” in the upcoming Avatar sequel.

Avatar: Fire and Ash, in theaters Dec. 19, will bring back Worthington’s Jake Sully, Zoe Saldaña’s Na’vi warrior Neytiri and their Pandora-dwelling family that was introduced in 2022’s sequel Avatar: The Way of Water. But, as the Australian actor recently said, there’s trouble in paradise.

“Jake and Neytiri share this painful wound,” Worthington, 48, told Empire Magazine, referring to the characters’ loss of their eldest child, Neteyam, in the previous installment. “They can’t seem to heal each other.”

The parenting pair “kind of split, not because they want to, but because they’re just trying to survive within themselves,” he revealed. “Jake heads back to battle and Neytiri kind of closes down… He doesn’t know how to go forward, and so he goes back to the world that he knows, which is soldiering. To attack, to go to war, that’s a comforting place for Jake.”

https://people.com/sam-worthington-zoe-saldana-avatar-characters-split-apart-sequel-11782261