Stars Gordon Cormier, Kiawentiio, Dallas Liu, and Ian Ousley look fire.

And the world needs him now more than ever.

“It also was a great opportunity for us to bond.

We hadn’t even really met at that point.”

“It’s slightly darker.

“Hopefully people are giving me grace a little and to see me grow into the character more.”

“I wanted to confirm that Sokka was funny,” he says.

“There’s more weight with the realism in every way,” the actor says.

“There are things that were redirected just because it might play a little different.”

“Mine was about going to some random academy, but I hated my father.

That was so obviously Zuko,” Liu recalls.

“Knowing all of that as a kid really made me fall in love with his character.”

I didn’t think too much of it, honestly, he says.

Ian started calling it the joystick on the first day.

But it definitely tapped me into my character a lot.

The next savior

In a world full of benders, the Avatar stands alone.

Cormier’s Aang is the next lifecycle’s Avatar.

Air head

Bending boot camp was slightly different for Cormier than it was for his costars.

“It was really awesome.”

A different incarnation

Cormier admits he considered dropping out of theAvatarauditions.

“I actually considered not doing it because I didn’t know what it was,” he says.

“It was like a 90-line audition.

I was a small 11-year-old, and they were looking for a 12-year-old.

So I was thinking, I’m not going to book this.

I don’t fit the casting.”

Then everything changed when the casting directors came back with positive feedback.

“So I did it!”

He’s seen the animated original countless times over and regularly dives deep into fan-made YouTube videos.

“Shoutout toThe Avatarist,” he says of the YouTube handle.

“The whole cast watches him, and we really love that guy.”

The Aang gang

Ian Ousley, Gordon Cormier, Kiawentiio, and Dallas Liu assemble.

Heroes and villains blur

Can you tell which is a hero and which is a villain?

Maybe those lines will blur as the show goes on.

In the animated series, the character was a young rebel fighting against the Fire Nation.

In the live-action reimagining, he’s described as a warrior from the Earth Kingdom.

(The handheld folding kind, not show obsessives.)

An OG returns

Daniel Dae Kim is already part of theAvatarfamily.

Learn more about the live-actionAvatar: The Last Airbenderwith EW’s cover story.