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There is a particular kind of stillness that happens just before a show starts. It’s the moment before the curtain lifts, before the world shifts from what it was to what it will become. For Jack Champion, that moment has stretched nearly a decade, the long inhale between being cast in Avatar at age 12 and arriving now, at 21, as both a young man and an actor shaped by one of the most ambitious filmmaking experiments in history.
Champion plays Spider in Avatar: Fire and Ash and Avatar: The Way of Water, both of which were shot simultaneously in 2017 over more than three years of production, with the former set for release in December 2025.
When Spider appears on screen, audiences see a character who bridges worlds Human and Na’vi, belonging and estrangement, youth and responsibility. But what remains mostly unseen is the parallel journey behind the camera. The story of a boy quite literally growing into himself under the weight, discipline and imagination required of James Cameron’s universe. His story is not about precocious fame or meteoric rise; it’s about something slower, steadier and far more human; a rite of passage lived in real time.
Growing into the Character, Growing into Himself
Champion was cast young, “12, no puberty yet,” as he puts it with unfiltered honesty, with charming laugh. Spider, as written, is in that volatile, combustible window of adolescence. He is emotional, unpredictable, fuelled by the sharp edges of teenage instinct. But Jack arrived on set still in the quieter prelude to all that.
“I was trying to play a teenager when I wasn’t one yet,” he says. In those first years, he was mimicking an experience he hadn’t yet lived, irritation without hormones, rebellion without the stimulus behind it. And then, as filming continued across overlapping productions, something aligned. Jack’s own adolescence arrived. His voice deepened, his frame stretched, his sense of self widened.
“I grew into the character,” he says. Not metaphorically, but physically, emotionally, biologically. It is rare for an actor’s timeline to sync with a character’s so precisely. We are all numbed to the constant mismatch between actors and their onscreen characters’ ages. So this alignment was rare, but rarer still for it to happen under the scrutiny and permanence of a global blockbuster. That alignment became the backbone of our cover star’s coming of age. He was learning who he was while learning who Spider was, the two shaping each other in ways impossible to choreograph.
A Body Built
The transformation wasn’t only internal. From the moment he was cast, it was clear he needed to embody a boy raised in the wild. Agile, lean, resilient, almost feral in his physicality.
The studio’s solution was not to fake it. They hired a trainer, Josh Murillo, who would become one of the core figures in Champion’s life. “I’d never lifted a weight before,” he says. “I was an outdoor kid, climbing trees, running barefoot, but not athletic.” What followed was discipline in its purest form, five days a week in the gym for years, learning to push, fail, recover, try again.
The milestone that stays with him is humble and telling: “I couldn’t do one pull-up. Now I can do 10 clean ones.” He says it without bravado; it’s simply a fact, evidence of effort. The work became routine, “like brushing your teeth,” he quotes Murillo, and the routine became identity. Even now, long after those early years, he trains almost daily. Cardio, weights, movement. Not for a role, but for himself.
These are the kinds of rituals that quietly mark adulthood, the private foundation that builds a life: showing up, staying consistent, learning what the body can endure. It’s its own rite of passage, made not as spectacle but repetition.
Learning Grit in Water
If the physical training hardened him, the filming itself tempered him. The world of Avatar is built on imagination, yes, but also on intense physical demands; water tanks, motion capture rigs, hours underwater in full-face scuba masks, long stretches in environments that were less about Hollywood glamour and more about gruelling determination.
“Sometimes I felt less like an actor and more like a scuba person,” he laughs. But the truth beneath the joke is more revealing. These were moments of discomfort, claustrophobia, cold, exhaustion. Moments where a young kid could have stumbled. Instead, Champion learned the thing he now carries into every role, every challenge: grit.
“If I can film this movie, any other movie is going to be a cakewalk.”
There are coming of age moments that happen in grand ceremonies, and then there are the ones shaped in silence, underwater, in the dark, waiting for a cue, trusting yourself to stay steady when everything around you demands endurance. Champion’s was the latter.
Failure as a Teacher
One of the most grounded parts of Champion’s perspective, and arguably the most adult, is his comfort with failure. It is unusual for a young actor raised in extreme visibility to speak of failure without flinching, but he speaks of it with a philosophical clarity is was comforting.
“In order to learn, you have to fail,” he says simply. Avatar was an education in this. There were scenes that didn’t land, training goals that took longer to reach, moments where instinct wasn’t enough. Instead of internalising these as shortcomings, he began to see them as steps; sometimes painful ones, but always formative.
He talks about it with the matter-of-fact tone of someone who has accepted that life’s terrain will not always be smooth, and that strength comes not from avoidance but from accumulation of experience. With enough lessons, enough support, enough resilience, advancement can be achieved no matter what future difficulty arrives.
That awareness, that intuition is far greater than many who exceed his years.
Community as Compass
Though Champion’s personal growth has been framed around discipline and grit, he is quick to point out that he did not grow up alone. On the Avatar set, the cast and crew formed something closer to a village than a workplace, a rare environment where adults understood their responsibility – not just to a production, but to the young people inside it.
Even those without children, he says, adopted a quiet instinct to guide, protect and model stability. Cameron’s world is demanding, but its ecosystem was nurturing, too. That balance between the pressure and protection seems to have shaped Champion as much as any training.
His mother, who accompanied him throughout filming, remains his foundational example of strength and care. And Sigourney Weaver, whom he describes without hesitation as “an icon”, became a figure of admiration – not because of fame, but because of presence. To him, she is not just an actor he worked with, but a model for how to live a life of impact without needing to announce it.
This matters to Champion. His definition of “iconic” is not celebrity, but impact. “If you affect a lot of people,” he says, “you’re an icon.” It’s a surprisingly grounded, unglamorous definition, reflective of someone raised around spectacle but not consumed by it.
Crossing Thresholds
If there is a single moment he identifies as a personal rite of passage, it is the first time he travelled alone. Seventeen years old, navigating an airport, responsible for himself in a way that felt new. “It was like stepping into my big boy pants,” he says, laughing with a mix of embarrassment and pride. This is a moment that is relatable, a moment of complete and utter self reliance, one that can bring both fear and satisfaction.
Since then, the solo journeys have multiplied: road trips, work travel, film shoots… The freedom is real, but so is the responsibility. Get yourself there. Get yourself on time. No one is doing it for you. These are milestones no one photographs, but they mark the border between adolescence and adulthood more clearly than red carpets ever could.
Stepping into New Worlds
Champion speaks with excitement about what’s ahead. From new roles, new genres, new skills. He wants to be challenged. He wants to do what he hasn’t done before. There’s a dream of a Western one day, a fascination with horror, a hunger for the unexpected.
He has begun training in singing and dancing for a recent film, and now he is learning the banjo; an earnest ambition that, coming from someone with no musical talent, says more about him than any blockbuster credit. He is not chasing perfection, he is chasing capability with curiosity and openmindedness… The next small threshold to cross.
Prepared for the Hard Chapters: The Man Emerges
Perhaps the most quietly profound thing Champion says is that he believes all of these experiences are preparing him not for fame, but for hardship. That life will, inevitably, bring difficulty, and that the strength built now, the lessons absorbed, the love received, will give him the resilience to face it.
It is a remarkably grounded worldview for someone whose adulthood is unfolding in front of millions. But perhaps that’s exactly why he holds onto it. When life is scaled so large, you learn quickly what actually matters.
As he celebrates turning 21, another cultural marker, another threshold, Champion is not defining himself by the magnitude of Avatar or the machinery of Hollywood. His rites of passage have been smaller, quieter and deeply internal. There is nothing fantastical about these transformations. No spectacle required. Just a boy growing into a man, shaped by discipline, community, imagination and long, steady patience.
For all its technology and mythology, Avatar is at its core a story about connection – connection to nature, to others, to oneself. In a way, Jack Champion’s journey mirrors that. His transformation did not happen in a single moment or scene. It happened slowly, between breaths, between takes, between the child he was and the man he is now.
That is the essence of a rite of passage: not the event, but the enduring evolution of character. And for Jack Champion, that evolution is only just beginning.
Photography: Jake Terrey
Production: Fatima Mourad
Producer: Imad Elsheikh
Line Producer: Amna Ali
Production Company: PIQUE
Photography Assistant: Nick Grady
Digitech: Alex Lv
Production Assistant: Bruno Aponte
Stylist: Ian McRae
Grooming: Melissa Dezarate
Manicurist: Pika @theguythatdoesnails
Talent: Jack Champion
Words: Kevin Breen
THIS FEATURE IS PUBLISHED IN THE 8TH EDITION OF ICON MENA PRINT MAGAZINE. ORDER YOUR COPY HERE.
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