This interview contains spoilers for Scream VI
Jack Champion has been living on a different planet. For the past half-decade, the 18-year-old actor has been on Pandora — the lush, exotic planet on which Avatar: The Way of Water is set — shooting James Cameron’s box office smash and its forthcoming sequels.
In preparation for the role of Spider, a feral, loin-clothed human kid who wound up stranded on Pandora, raised by the movie’s blue-hued alien Na’vi, he spent five years travelling around the world getting into shape, learning skills like parkour, ju-jitsu, and boxing. “It was insane, coming from Virginia, going to train in Hawaii, then going to LA, for performance capture,” he says. Jack shot most of his scenes independently from the predominantly performance-captured cast, then spent time in New Zealand, two years later, as a reference for his co-stars when shooting.
His intense workout routine “helped” him immerse in Spider. “You can just dive into the character’s mindset more when you’re away from home, away from your roots, and away from the stuff that makes you you,” he says. “You’re completely separate. It’s easy to become someone else.”
But now, Jack’s at home in Virginia, lounging in a baggie MTV hoodie and baker boy cap and surrounded by the stuff that makes him himself. Butters, his grey and white hairless cat, has taken up residence on his lap. “I missed home,” he says of the years spent away from Virginia. “But once I’m back it’s the best feeling.”
He’s returned here having spent a few days in New York celebrating the premiere of his latest project, Scream VI. In the new instalment of the horror franchise, which takes place in NYC for the first time, he plays the nerdy, wholesome Ethan, one of the film’s many possible new suspects-slash-victims. Scream has long been a breeding ground for teen stars — think Rose McGowan, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Emma Roberts. Now, alongside Wednesday’s Jenna Ortega, he’s part of the series’ next generation.
His New York trip will remain memorable for myriad reasons. For one, this is the first time he’s spent time wandering its streets properly since Avatar became one of the highest grossing films of all time. “Oh my god,” he blurts out. “I was in Times Square with my mom and these two girls came up to us like, ‘Are you Jack Champion from Avatar?’ I was like, in what world did you recognise me?” He recounts this anecdote animatedly, but his sleeves are tucked nervously over his hands. Being recognised in the street unexpectedly is a prospect he’s getting used to in real time.
Those girls weren’t the only ones to recognise him, either. By chance, he ran into the original Scream queen Drew Barrymore in a hotel lobby. “She was staring at me and I was like, ‘Is… Drew Barrymore staring at me?’,” he says. She had already seen Scream VI and loved him in it. “Apparently she rented out some theatre in Times Square and watched it… because, of course she did.” Did the pair swap notes as Scream stars from two different generations? “Yeah,” he says, smiling. “She introduced herself to me as Casey Becker.”
Jack decided he wanted to act when he was eight years old, getting his start in school theatre. “I’d tried sports all my life,” he says. “I was really tall and big for my age but I was never competitive. Once I found out that every play, every show, every role is different, it spoke to me. Sports was just the same thing over and over again.”
He was raised in a rural campus town in Virginia, by his mother, a microbiologist. His parents are “dorky, booksmart, natural PhD Masters people”, he says, but he can’t relate: “I never got straight As, for sure.” That incompatibility with academia paired with his disinterest in sports meant he had to follow a different path: “School’s not my thing and sports is not my thing. Shit, I’m out of luck!,” he recalls saying to himself. “But luckily I found acting.”
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Making the journey from Blacksburg to Pandora was “insane,” he says. “I always thought you’d just sit down [in your trailer] with your oat milk latte, and get called to set, but Avatar was such a different way of filming.” James Cameron, the visionary director behind the series, told his actors that making the film would be akin to joining the military. “It was early mornings, Monday through Friday, working your ass off.”
But that intensity didn’t apply to the shoot of Scream VI, which Jack compares to being like “a high-budget student film”. The atmosphere on set felt different, owing to the company of his co-stars. “I was with Jasmin [Savoy Brown], Jenna [Ortega], Mason [Gooding], all of the cast were always together,” he says. “We were always there for each other just goofing around between takes.”
Spoiler alert for those who’ve not yet seen it: in Scream VI’s final act, we learn that Ethan is one of the film’s iconic Ghostface killers. “It’s one of the best, I think maybe the best horror honours you could get,” he says. This is one of the first times he’s spoken out loud about donning the iconic mask: “It feels wrong talking about it.”
Since Scream VI came out, the cast have already begun disputing who played Ghostface at what points. “No one knows who it is in the bodega [scene],” he says of Scream VI’s most brutal sequence, a moment when the typically clumsy Ghostface expertly wields a shotgun. “It’s up for debate [but] yeah… I’m just gonna say it was me.”
Jack turned 18 in November. He has already starred in the second and third highest grossing movies of all time: both Avatar: The Way of Water and a brief, non-speaking part in Avengers: Endgame. He shakes his head in disbelief: “I don’t know where you’d go from there. Honestly, I really don’t know.”
Work on the Avatar films, from his side at least, has been complete: In a bid to ensure Spider looked the same age across all films, Jack has already shot his scenes, thus meaning he holds many of the series’ most important secrets. No matter how hard you try, though, he won’t reveal what’s still to come. Ask him about the franchise and his poker face switches on; a lot rides on how tight-lipped James Cameron’s cast members are.
Scale-wise, he’s pretty satiated it seems, but in terms of parts he’d like to play he does have some ideas; something more “normal and grounded”, like a rom-com. “Whether I’m the goofy best friend or the main character, I feel like I could do that pretty well.” He’s keen to work with filmmakers like the Coen Brothers and David Fincher. He might be shooting a film with Bryan Cranston in the spring.
But right now, there’s Virginia, home and Butters the cat. A few days after we speak, Scream VI shoots to the top of the US box office. “Yeah, it’s pretty nice that I can still go to Chipotle and not be recognised,” he says, perhaps jinxing the fate of his quiet kind of fame. It’s all likely to change soon. For now, he’s savouring it.
Credits
Photography Sabrina Santiago