Oona Castilla Chaplin has spent most of her career as the determined woman at the edge of a period drama. Handed a villain in Avatar: Fire and Ash, she played it with an appetite the series had never allowed and outgrew the film around her.
Fi1m perspective
Varang, the leader of the Ash People in Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025), looks at Quaritch the way nobody has looked at him in three films, and Oona Castilla Chaplin plays the look as if she has been waiting years to give it. She enjoys her cruelty and she enjoys her weapons. Under the motion capture there is a dancer: Chaplin trained in ballet, flamenco and salsa before she trained as an actor, and Varang moves like someone who knows where every limb is at every moment. We sat up. Three films in, we had stopped expecting to be interested in anyone on Pandora, and she made us.
It has taken a while. Chaplin left RADA in 2007, took small television parts (Spooks, 2007), then found the places British drama keeps for a certain kind of woman: strong, intense, usually in period costume, usually heading for a bad end. Marnie Madden in The Hour (2011), Talisa Maegyr in Game of Thrones (2012), Zilpha Geary opposite Tom Hardy in Taboo (2017), with stops in Black Mirror, Sherlock and Inside No. 9 (2014) along the way. It is respectable work and nearly all of it is supporting. Varang, under James Cameron, is the first part in years to build a film's villain around her.
The Hour shows the limit of the earlier phase. We wrote that Marnie was given a hostess's smile and a great deal to hide behind it, and that was the whole part: the wife in the good frock while Ben Whishaw and Romola Garai did the drama. Chaplin did what could be done with it, which was to make the smile look expensive to hold. Cameron gives her the opposite, fury with nowhere to hide. She has said of Varang, "I instantly connected with her rage," and it shows on screen; there is no wink to the audience, no plea for sympathy, only a woman who likes the fight and is good at it.
We scored Fire and Ash 58. She is the reason to go, and the film around her repeats itself for well over three hours. That is her position at the moment in a sentence: the best thing in something that does not quite deserve her. Someone should now give her a film of her own, and a running time she can fill.
Biography
Oona Castilla Chaplin is a Spanish-British actress. She trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, graduating in 2007, and had earlier attended Gordonstoun School in Scotland.
Her screen roles include Talisa Maegyr in the HBO series Game of Thrones (2012–2013), Zilpha Geary in the FX series Taboo (2017), and Varang in the film Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025). She is a member of the Chaplin family, the daughter of actress Geraldine Chaplin and cinematographer Patricio Castilla, and the granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin.
