Ahead of the show’s premiere on Netflix, we got a chance to chat with the Avatar: The Last Airbender live-action cast, including Gordon Cormier who plays Aang.
As with any live-action adaptation of a popular cartoon or anime, the question on many fans’ minds is: how will the live-action version differ from the original? Well, in Netflix’s latest project, there are some major differences story-wise, even though a lot of the individual parts of the story are straight out of the animated series. Think of it like a remix where several episodes from the cartoon are mixed into one.
Meanwhile, the characters are generally true to their cartoon counterparts, albeit with some differences that give them a different dimension. Gordon Cormier confirmed this during a recent Avatar virtual media roundtable we got to attend.
There, we got to ask Cormier about how his portrayal of Aang differs from the original. Cormier said that there is a minor change, and that is the fact that we see more of Aang’s inner feelings in this version of the story.
“The one minor thing we changed is we got to see deeper into Aang’s feelings,” said Cormier. “In the cartoon, you couldn’t really see what Aang’s going through because, well, young children was who the show was mainly for. But young children don’t want to see a kid go through these feelings. They want to see a kid bending and doing cool fight scenes. But here we got to dig deep into what Aang’s going through, but definitely keeping the fun-spirited, awesome character that he is.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean Aang is a totally different character in the live-action series. Cormier said that he wanted to say true to the original still, to the point that he even watch the original show 26 times!
“I like to stay quite true to my character,” shared Cormier. “Aang is just super happy and really young, which I think is very important.”
The Avatar: The Last Airbender live-action series is now streaming worldwide, exclusively on Netflix.