We recently got to chat with Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, the actor of the fan-favorite Uncle Iroh in Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender live-action series.
Ahead of the show’s premiere, we were able to ask Lee about his experience with the series in a virtual media roundtable. More specifically, he shared how his life experience helped him give his own spin on the “Dragon of the West.”
[NOTE: There are spoilers for the Avatar: The Last Airbender animated and live-action series in this article]
Iroh is a jovial old man, but he wasn’t always like this. As revealed in the story, Iroh’s view of life changed after his son died, and soon, he became a warm father figure to Zuko.
This is a key part of Iroh’s character, and Lee shared that being a father helped inform his portrayal of Iroh, saying:
“As an artist, we always try to incorporate lived experiences or things that we’ve gone through ourselves to help inform our performances. And I’m a father, I’ve got two sons, and I could not imagine losing one of them like that. So, that kind of loss would devastate me.
In terms of portraying Iroh and seeing that he’s lost that part of him that he can never give back, I mean, Iroh would give anything to see his son again, and that’s not going to happen. He sees his young nephew, who showed such kindness and compassion to him during that time of loss that he naturally sees that when he is exiled, he needs to be there for his nephew. He becomes sort of a surrogate father to him. And Zuko becomes a bit of a surrogate son for him. He’s lucky in the sense that he has that outlet in which to sort of, you’ve lost your son, but you have someone else that can take his place and that you can try to impart some of that wisdom, some of that care and compassion to. And so, I drew on that, especially with the emotional scenes.
Once you have kids, it makes it very, very easy to sort of drop yourselves in those situations, especially if you’re dealing with ideas of loss or disciplining or other things. So, it was little things like that.”
That’s not to say Lee focused solely on bringing out Iroh’s more serious character traits. Watching the series, you’ll see that Lee also played Iroh with the humor that he has in the original cartoon.
“Of course, the humor is another,” said Lee. “I’m a goof anyways in real life so it’s fun to draw on that and to observe other people, and I like to see what makes people laugh and maybe play with that a little bit. And so, with Dallas, it was a joy to play with him on that level, too.”
The Avatar: The Last Airbender live-action series is now streaming worldwide, exclusively on Netflix.