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Zoe Saldaña was not looking forward to filming a series of challenging underwater scenes for ‘Avatar: The Way of the Water,’ after she learned more about the storyline.
“The first step is you fake it till you make it: You tell your boss, ‘Yeah, absolutely, I’m so excited,’ and then it’s complete horror, like, ‘What am I going to do?’ At best, you’re going to walk away with a brand-new aptitude, but I was scared,” she shared.
Fans of the first film will notice a change in locations on the upcoming sequel, as the 2009 fan-favorite film had characters interacting in the rainforest, however they will now be underwater most of the time, making actors adapt to certain scenes.
“I come from generations of island people, and the one thing people don’t know about island life is that if you’re from islands that have been colonized, a great percentage of people don’t know how to swim. Through folklore, you are taught to love the ocean as if it’s a goddess, but you fear it,” Zoe explained.
And while she was scared at first, she quickly felt “very competitive” about the challenging situations, and managed to hold her breath for almost five minutes, earning the third place amongst her co-star, with Sigourney Weaver with six-and-a-half minutes and Kate Winslet with seven minutes.
“Kate’s a demon for prep, so she latched onto the free diving as something that she could build her character around,” Director James Cameron previously said about the actress.
He continued, “Kate’s character is someone who grew up underwater as an ocean-adapted Na’vi - they’re so physically different from the forest Na’vi, that we’d almost classify them as a subspecies. So she had to be utterly calm underwater, and it turned out that she was a natural.”