NEED TO KNOW
\nOona Chaplin stars in James Cameron\u2019s new Avatar installment, Fire and Ash\u00a0The granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin, the actress once considered changing her name, she revealed in an interview\u201cIt\u2019s been a journey to feel deserving, because I know that doors have opened for me that potentially wouldn\u2019t have opened if I wasn\u2019t associated with this brilliant man,\u201d Oona said of the late Charlie<\/p>\n
Avatar: Fire and Ash<\/a> star Oona Chaplin<\/a> once considered changing her name to distance herself from her famous grandfather: filmmaking pioneer Charlie Chaplin.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been a journey to feel deserving, because I know that doors have opened for me that potentially wouldn\u2019t have opened if I wasn\u2019t associated with this brilliant man,\u201d Oona, 39, told The Times<\/a> in a recent interview.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s definitely tricky to feel undeserving of the place you\u2019re in,\u201d the actress said, adding that she considered changing her name upon graduation from London\u2019s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.\n<\/p>\n Per The Times, Oona shifted her mindset \u201cfrom guilt to gratitude by working really hard and knowing that whatever I do is never going to compare to what my grandfather did.\u201d\n<\/p>\n Oona Chaplin in “Avatar: Fire and Ash”.<\/p>\n courtesy of 20th Century Studios<\/p>\n Never miss a story \u2014 sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter<\/a> to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer\u200b\u200b, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n Oona said she also considers keeping her given name an extension of the legacy of the silent-film icon, who died in 1977 before she was born.\n<\/p>\n \u201cIf all my purpose in this realm is for people to say, \u2018Oh, Charlie Chaplin\u2019s granddaughter,’ and they google him and watch a movie of his, then I\u2019m happy because he\u2019s such a genius.\u201d\n<\/p>\n Charlie\u2019s fourth wife was Oona O\u2019Neill, daughter of legendary playwright Eugene O\u2019Neill, from whom the Avatar star gets her first name. Oona was born in Madrid, Spain to English-American actress Geraldine Chaplin and Chilean filmmaker Patricio Castilla, and grew up all over the world, including the U.K., Switzerland and Cuba. She had settled in the latter country when James Cameron<\/a>\u2019s third Avatar film became a possibility.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n \u201cI pretty much kind of was practicing quitting acting and I built myself a tree house in the jungle in Cuba, and I was like, I’m going to live here now, so I’m done,\u201d Oona told PEOPLE before the release of Fire and Ash.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n \u201cIt made me fall in love with acting again,\u201d she said of playing the movie\u2019s villainous Varang. \u201cIt helped me also develop this immense gratitude for my profession and for the gift of telling stories that I’d kind of forgotten about.\u201d\n<\/p>\n Oona Chaplin on Dec. 15, 2025.<\/p>\n Manuel Velasquez\/Getty<\/p>\n As for the Avatar movies\u2019 connection to her groundbreaking grandfather, Oona points out there are \u201ca lot of parallels.\u201d\n<\/p>\n Both Charlie and Cameron, 71, were \u201cworking with cutting-edge technology. They’re both telling stories in innovative ways, but they both are absolutely rooted and centered in the human heart and the human condition.\u201d\n<\/p>\n Avatar: Fire and Ash, starring Zoe Salda\u00f1a<\/a>, Sam Worthington<\/a>, Sigourney Weaver<\/a>, Stephen Lang and more, is in theaters now.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEED TO KNOW Oona Chaplin stars in James Cameron\u2019s new Avatar installment, Fire and Ash\u00a0The granddaughter of Charlie…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":197061,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-197060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197060\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}