Jack Champion grew up inside one part, the human boy the Na'vi half-adopted, and he plays him as someone who knows exactly how much he is tolerated. On Pandora that stillness lands; away from it he has yet to be given anything as good.
Fi1m perspective
Spider is the only human in the Sully household, and he knows it. In Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025) Jack Champion plays him as a teenager who has worked out how much he is tolerated by the family that half-adopted him, and who has decided not to ask for more. He keeps up with people far taller than he is and never makes a speech about it. It is a small thing to do well in a film that size, and he does it.
He has been doing it since he was twelve. James Cameron cast him after a four-month audition for Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), shot between 2017 and 2020 with material for the sequels filmed alongside, so Champion grew up inside the role: two years of bodybuilding, freediving until he could hold his breath for more than four minutes, performance capture and live action both. He has said, "With Spider, I feel like it's just a different version of me that would be on Pandora, growing up in the situation he's in", and that is how it reads. Some critics found the first outing pitched too loud; we did not review it. By the third film the performance has settled.
The stretch in the middle of Fire and Ash about what the Sullys owe Spider and what they do not moved us more than we were ready for, in a film we otherwise found repeating itself for well over three hours. Part of that is Cameron letting a scene go quiet and stay quiet, which he rarely does. Most of it is Champion, who plays the boy's hurt as something he has learned to carry rather than something he wants us to notice. It is the one part of the film that goes somewhere new without a battle.
Away from Pandora he is less distinctive. In Scream VI (2023) his Ethan Landry is placed exactly where a suspect is placed and the film knows we know it; he is pleasant and easy to forget for long stretches, and what we remember from that film is Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega arguing in a kitchen. Freaky Tales (2024), for Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, put him in an ensemble where the fit was not obvious. The pattern so far is an actor who is good when a director has years to spend on him and ordinary when he is one face among many.
That is not a bad place to be, but it is one man's franchise, and Champion has grown up with Cameron behind the camera. The interesting film is the one where somebody else is.
Biography
Jack Champion is an American actor. Born on 16 November 2004 in Blacksburg, Virginia, he began acting as a child in school theatre and short films.
Champion appeared in small roles including Avengers: Endgame (2019) and the lead in The Night Sitter (2018). He was cast at age 12 as Miles 'Spider' Socorro in James Cameron's Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), a role that involved extensive performance capture work and for which he trained in freediving and scuba. He reprised the part in Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025).
In 2023 he played Ethan Landry in the slasher film Scream VI.
