With "10 times the number of sets we had for season 1," the cast and crew discuss how they brought the Ba Sing Se chapter to life.
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| Credit: Netflix |
In early March 2024, the principal stars of
Avatar: The Last Airbender, Netflix’s live-action retelling of the beloved Nickelodeon animated series, gathered over Zoom under uncertain pretenses. A request for a seemingly general meeting about season 2 came “out of the blue, completely random” within weeks of the season 1 premiere, Ian Ousley (boomerang-throwing Sokka) told
Entertainment Weekly.
The show seemed like a success on paper. Based on the publicly shared stats, the show reached 21.2 million views within four days on Netflix, topped the streamer’s English-language TV chart, and broke into the top 10 in 92 countries. Yet, when it came to the prospect of a renewal, “Some people felt confident and some people were really very nervous,” Kiawentiio (waterbending Katara) notes.
“You just never know,” Elizabeth Yu (Fire Nation Princess Azula) adds. “Sometimes a show could be huge and there just isn't a place for it to get to see the story through.”
Ousley, Kiawentiio, and Yu joined the call with Gordon Cormier (Aang), Dallas Liu (Zuko), and Paul Sun-Hyung Lee (Iroh), with Daniel Dae Kim (Fire Lord Ozai) taking charge of the conversation. It wasn't long before he dropped a bomb: “I’m sorry if this was unexpected, but they are not able to announce a season 2 for our show.”
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| Gordon Cormier as Aang, Kiawentiio as Katara in 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' season 2. | Credit: Netflix |
The faces of the young stars — who grew up on set making season 2 — said it all. “I'm not hiding it very well,” the star behind the titular Avatar admits of that Zoom call, “but I feel like I was almost so shocked that I was smiling out of a coping mechanism.”
Ousley has one issue with that video in hindsight. “They zoomed in on my face and I'm tearing up. That was [from a different call] when Albert Kim, who was our season 1 showrunner, told us how proud of us he was,” the actor recalls. “When Daniel was like, ‘Season 2’s not happening,’ I was like, ‘Hmm. I don't know if I'm buying this.’”
He had good reason to be suspicious. Seconds later, Kim broke the real news: “They’re not able to announce a season 2 because they would like to
announce season 2 and season 3.”
“[We] group FaceTimed within three minutes of the Zoom finishing,” Cormier recalls. “We all talked for like 45 minutes, all just expressing our joy to get back to it.”
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| Gordon Cormier as Aang, Miyako as Toph in 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' season 2. | Credit: Katie Yu/Netflix |
The Aang gang officially reassembled later that September, about three years after filming season 1, to shoot both 2 and 3 back-to-back over the course of a calendar year — all to see the full live-action adaptation through to the end.
A significant time jump was built into the season 2 plan to account for the cast’s real-time aging. When Jabbar Raisani, a lead season 2 executive producer, first met Cormier, “He literally went up to my belly button,” he points out, “and now he's taller than me.” Returning to Netflix this June 25, the story picks up when the characters are noticeably older, though Raisani mentions, “We don’t get into how many months it is” after the events of that season 1 finale.
It’s at least clear that a lot happened during that span off screen, including Aang and Katara becoming much more adept at waterbending. Raisani and his EP counterpart, Christine Boylan, used that time jump to solve a time-and-resources problem. “There are so many adventures that exist in the animated series that we couldn't put in the show,” Boylan says. “A lot of it falls in between seasons, and it can happen even in between episodes.”
There’s still plenty of ground to cover, including what transpires in the Earth Kingdom capital of Ba Sing Sei and the arrival of fan-favorite Toph (Miyako), the blind earthbender and a crucial member of Team Avatar.
The seat of Earth Kingdom power
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| Gordon Cormier as Aang in 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' season 2. | Credit: Netflix |
Boylan, promoted from her season 1 position of co-executive producer, says they had two requests heading into the sophomore run: more practical sets and what she calls “Fire Nation succession.”
The impact of the first point is apparent on a gloomy day in late February 2025 on the Vancouver production. Raisani, who also served as a director and visual effects supervisor on season 1, estimates they had “10 times” more sets and locations this time around, while the Volume, an LED-lit stage used for virtual production, was scaled back.
One such set lies in the city’s Flavelle, Port Moody location, where a sprawling makeshift village depicts different boroughs of Ba Sing Se, the next target in Fire Lord Ozai’s mission for global domination. Imagery of Badgermoles and Lion Turtles adorn the nearby roofing as Easter eggs.
It’s the same location where Shōgun, FX’s Emmys-sweeping historical epic, previously set up shop. Boylan acknowledges, “Are we going to look like Shōgun?” became a recurring question, given the Asian influence and medieval time period. To ensure the answer remained no, they went back to the cartoon for inspiration.
“The rules are specifically that the Earth Kingdom is Japan and China, the Fire Nation is Southeast Asia, the Air Nomads are very much Tibet, and then the Water Tribes are First Nations,” production designer Michael Wylie mentions on a stroll through the upper and lower rings of their Ba Sing Se — distinctions established by Avatar: The Last Airbender creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko.
This cultural fusion — visible through the various food markets, bazaars, and tea shops along the main streets — is reflective of the writers’ launching pad for the season arc, which the executive producers describe as “the immigrant experience.” It came straight from the source material, while the writers’ room also pulled from personal experiences and historical research.
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| Amanda Zhou as Joo Dee, James Sie as Cabbage Man in 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' season 2. Credit: Katie Yu/Netflix |
As civilians of the surrounding areas become displaced by the Fire Nation, more and more refugees, including Zuko and Iroh, who’ve been living off the grid, make their way to the capital. However, upon arrival, a propaganda machine is in full effect to persuade the Earth King’s subjects that “there is no war in Ba Sing Se” (to quote a familiar phrase from the animated original).
“Underground” (i.e. the indoor stages at the neighboring CMPP Studios in Vancouver) lies a sprawling network of gravelly tunnels illuminated by glowing gems embedded in the walls. These are the Crystal Caves, where Joo Dee (Amanda Zhou), Ba Sing Se’s Cultural Ambassador, is undergoing a reprogramming of sorts. On set, Boylan makes references to Get Out and HBO’s The Sympathizer.
“This is a show about life during war time,” Boylan says. “This is a show about these kids bonding. This is a show about these kids trying to come of age in this world and remake the world in a better way.”
Cormier calls himself "the Half Avatar" at this point, a reference to how Aang now has two elements under his belt but still needs to master earth and fire. “We have this banger first episode where everything comes together and we reintroduce everybody," he says.
Viewers have already seen glimpses of the premiere, which involves Aang and Katara subduing a sea serpent while guiding refugees across a treacherous path. Cormier filmed the sequence atop a surfboard rig in front of blue screen to emulate the Avatar skating across the water’s surface.
“It was on a wire so it would sway, but we’re also trying to move our bodies in the sense that we’re waterbending,” he recalls. “That was quite difficult. Not for Kiawentiio, though. She got it within the span of like 40 minutes of rehearsing.”
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| Kiawentiio and Ian Ousley for 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' season 2. | Credit: Lenne Chai/Netflix |
As Katara mentors Aang in waterbending, Kiawentiio did the same for Cormier, who says his costar was “incredible coaching me in between takes.”
Katara is a formidable bender and healer at this stage of the story, and Kiawentiio was eager to adapt a particular arc from the cartoon: the Painted Lady. Katara dresses as this figure from folklore to help immigrants going through tough times.
“I felt so beautiful as the Painted Lady,” she says. “And, sure, the makeup took longer than I had ever been in this chair beforehand, but it was totally worth it. The girls ate it up. I want to shout them out because of how much detail is in the makeup.”
The Painted Lady arc doesn’t come into play until the third season of the animated original, but according to Kiawentiio, the writers tried various ways to adapt this plot point before realizing “it’s not going to be able to fit anywhere else” in their grand plan.
Following the tone of season 2, similar animation-to-live-action remixes are in store again, including with Sokka. “There’s so much weight that gets shifted around,” Ousley acknowledges. “The original animated show is amazing and also very emotionally deep, but it also touches on a lot of very mature topics that translate differently.”
For him, it was important to make sure Sokka wasn’t moving on too quickly from the loss of Princess Yue (Amber Midthunder), his love interest whose spirit returned to the moon in the season 1 finale’s Water Tribe battle. “That was just trying to make sure it didn’t look like he was a playboy, to be honest,” Ousley continues. “When you find him here in season 2, he has gone through something very traumatic where he’s still feeling a lot of responsibility.”
Toph as nails
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| Miyako as Toph in 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' season 2. Credit: Katie Yu/Netflix |
Another member of Team Aang enters the fold in season 2. On set, it’s easy to point out her home near the Ba Sing Se production. Just look for the Beifong family crest: a winged boar.
Toph Beifong is the daughter of an affluent family outside of the Earth Kingdom city. She’s blind, so her parents treat her like a delicate child, when in reality she’s one of the most proficient earthbenders in the world. In between takes, Ryan Halprin, another EP, plays footage on his laptop of “Toph vision” — what it looks like when the girl uses her bending to see by tapping into the vibrations of the earth.
Batman’s SONAR surveillance system in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight became an inspiration for the visuals. “I really started with Miyako,” Raisani says of developing that element. “It is about how she moves and how she functions as an earthbender.”
The team auditioned a wide swath of performers for the role, including blind, visually impaired, and low-vision actors. According to Boylan, a challenge emerged because “Toph can see, just not in the traditional sense.”
Miyako was someone who auditioned “for a couple parts” on season 1, the actress says, but she surmises she was too young at the age of 13 for any of them. The casting director kept her self-tape on file and, five years later, the Toph role came around. “That was a blessing in disguise,” Miyako says.
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| Gordon Cormier and Miyako for 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' season 2. | Credit: Lenne Chai/Netflix |
“She is the blunt truth teller of the group,” Boylan describes the new addition. “She has no shame about pretty much anything, which is the best kind of person to have along with you. She's also a tank.”
Blindness consultant Joe Strechay and his assistant trained with Miyako for six months prior to filming, in addition to attending every stunt rehearsal. The actress wore various contact lenses, some of which restricted her vision, to enhance the look. “My biggest concern was actually portraying a character who's blind or has low vision because I am not and I will never know what that's like,” Miyako says, while acknowledging Strechay’s team “took a lot of pressure off.”
A self-professed “hardcore fan” of the Nickelodeon series with her older brother, the actress describes her first day on set: filming the character's introduction. Aang and friends first witness her in action as “the Blind Bandit,” a participant in the underground “Earth Rumble” fighting tournament facing down the Boulder, a beefy sumo wrestler-type earthbender.
“I felt very nervous,” she remembers of that day. “It was not only Toph’s entrance, but it was mine. I needed to show what I was made of. I needed to show what I was gonna do for the rest of the season, and this sets the tone.”
Heated sibling rivalry
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| Elizabeth Yu and Dallas Liu for 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' season 2. | Credit: Lenne Chai/Netflix |
Inside the Crystal Caves stage in summer 2025, the team prepares a different kind of fight scene, one between Zuko and Azula. Liu, with his prior martial arts training, performs a backflip on command to dodge oncoming fire blasts (to be inserted in post). He lands with ease and performs a bending move with his arms, indicating the dispersing of his sister’s blue flames.
Yu, too, appears confident in her element. This time around, she arrives to set with sharp, extended fingernails to emulate that character feature in the animated show. The actress, also known for Todd Haynes' film May December, later comments on that subtle addition in a May 2026 interview.
“I went to Rebecca, who was the head of the makeup department,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Can we try it?! What do you think?’ Because it's so iconic from the animation. They're very claw-like. She was like, ‘If you're down with wearing long nails for a year straight, then yes, we can do it.’”
Discussing their Crystal Caves clash, Liu remembers how “the nail punctured a hole in my hand at one point.”
“I felt terrible,” Yu responds, “but I felt like Azula did her job…. They were a real-life weapon, almost.”
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| Dallas Liu and Gordon Cormier on set of 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' season 2. | Credit: Katie Yu/Netflix |
The sibling rivalry remains heated throughout season 2 as that idea of “Fire Nation succession” lingers in the characters’ minds. Zuko remains in exile but always with the promise of redemption should he capture the Avatar, while Azula is determined to prove herself as the rightful heir.
It's all about “trying to become dad's favorite" and "trying to play the game in order to try to succeed,” Yu says.
“I love royalty stories, I love sibling rivalries,” Boylan adds. “I am a reader of history, and pulling from different battles and different monarchies and all of those unstable world events was super interesting to inform the Fire Nation side of things.”
To enhance this sibling dynamic, the writers’ gave Zuko and Azula’s mom, who features in a much smaller storyline in the original, an expanded presence in the live-action drama. Lily Gao (Twisted Metal) portrays Ursa, whose memory plagues both of her children in their teenage years.
“The reason they can be so feisty with each other and so hurtful towards each other is because they are family, because they experienced trauma on such a deep level,” Liu explains. “It was only the two of them that know truly what happened. It really adds another layer to this sibling dynamic. It's not just a rivalry. It is an older brother and a younger sister trying to figure out who they are and how to handle healing from this [in] two very, very drastically different ways.”
Liu adds, "Two different ways, two different colors of fire."
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| Gordon Cormier, Kiawentiio, and Ian Ousley on set of 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' season 2. | Credit: Katie Yu/Netflix |
It's a long road ahead for these children of the Fire Nation, and the actors already shot more standout moments coming for the final season. Those include the “Agni Kai” firebender duel, which Liu enthusiastically calls “the coolest thing I've ever done in my life."
Another is the final face-off against Ozai. While on set, an executive producer mentions how they had to preemptively save a chunk of their budget on season 2 “knowing we’re going to need to go all-out.”
"It was huge," Cormier remarks. "Everything about it was big. I don't think we've ever shot a fight sequence as long as that one took. It was probably over the span of two weeks, and I think we went back to it quite a bit...Lots of wires, lots of insane stunts."
The ending of the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender is on everyone's minds even while filming season 2 last year. Boylan carries around a giant white binder labeled “season 3” while filming the Crystal Caves episodes. At one point, her assistant runs over to pull her away from the shoot, saying, “Season 3 Netflix meeting in 15 minutes.” Gabe Llanas, a co-executive producer, mentions in between takes, “We’re rewriting season 3 while working on season 2."
Liu and Yu remain deeply grateful and visibly enthused to be able to tell the entirety of the main Avatar story, even if the double-renewal first came with a fake-out.
“While we thought season 1 was good, we knew that we could do better,” Liu says. “Because so much time had passed, we were really ready to prove ourselves as actors. As young indigenous actors, we really wanted to show the world [that] this is an opportunity that has been presented to us that we're not gonna take for granted."
Avatar: The Last Airbender season two streams Thursday, June 25, exclusively on Netflix.
‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ Bosses on Cutting Sandbending, ‘The Drill’ Episode and Other Season 2 Changes: ‘There’s Only So Much We Can Fit’
SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Season 2 of the live-action “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” now streaming on Netflix.
Netflix’s live-action “Avatar: The Last Airbender” is back for Season 2, following Aang’s (Gordon Cormier) journey to learn earthbending from the young, blind mentor Toph Beifong (Miyako), just as in the second season of the original Nickelodeon show. Like the first series, Aang, Katara (Kiawentiio) and Sokka (Ian Ousley) travel to the walled city of Ba Sing Se to find an earthbending teacher. They’re pursued by Azula (Elizabeth Yu), princess of the Fire Nation, and her friends Mai (Thalia Tran) and Ty Lee (Momona Tamada). Meanwhile, exiled Prince Zuko (Dallas Liu) and his uncle Iroh (Paul Sun-Hyung) are on the run and try to blend into the quieter life of the Earth Kingdom.
While there, Aang and his friends discover a massive conspiracy within Ba Sing Se’s government that ignores the war going on outside the city walls. They also learn some critical intel from discovering the desert library of Wan Shi Tong that could defeat the Fire Nation once and for all: The upcoming solar eclipse will prevent all firebending and weaken their heated enemies. As they escape the library, Aang’s sky bison Appa is stolen, which nearly tears the friend group apart.
In the end, Aang’s crew recovers Appa and finds the missing Earth King, who’s unaware of his government’s cover-up of the war. However, Azula intercepts the group and duels Aang and Katara with Zuko, who nearly had a change of heart after opening up to Katara. In the climactic ending, Azula wields lightning and strikes Aang in the chest, which incapacitates him while he’s in the avatar state. Katara, Toph and Sokka escape with Aang and the Earth King, and Katara is able to heal Aang of his nearly fatal wound. They fly away from Ba Sing Se aboard Appa, as Aang faces a long road to recovery and must still learn how to firebend.
Speaking with Variety, showrunner Christine Boylan and executive producer Jabbar Raisani discuss the changes they made from the Nickelodeon show, such as cutting sandbending, adding in Katara’s Painted Lady arc from Season 3 and cutting the action-packed Nickelodeon Season 2 episode, “The Drill.”
I want to start with the season premiere, which takes the “Serpent’s Pass” episode from midway through the original series and kicks off this new season. How did you decide to make that Episode 1 of Season 2?
Christine Boylan: For the writing decision, I got everybody in the room on the first day, and we knew we wanted to deal with the refugee story on some level. It’s such a huge thematic part of the animated series. Everyone in the writers’ room and on the crew is a huge fan. I tried to remind everybody that we are doing an adaptation of a myth and a legend. That means it’s not exactly the same, and it’s never going to be one-to-one. We started to look at scenes and stories that are maybe not done as in-depth in the animation that we could accomplish here and get more emotional, get into the action in a way that maybe an animator can’t and what are some stories that are better done in animation that we wouldn’t want to touch because they’re perfect as it is.
We started out by talking about real-life refugee stuff, like people’s families and backstories. I said to the writers, “If you feel comfortable, tell me about your parents, grandparents, ancestors, when they went from place to place, why they did, how they did, who helped them, what was the hardship and what was the joy in those situations? We got amazing family stories, and we looked at all three seasons and started putting things on the board. We kept Season 3 in mind, even though we didn’t know if we were going to get to shoot Season 2. We definitely didn’t think we were going to shoot Season 3 yet, but we kept all three in mind, no matter what. Then we looked at the character arcs and their growth. Growth is not a straight line. You go up, down, backwards, forward again, you lurch in fits and starts, especially if you’re young. How can we make these growth arcs as interesting and surprising as possible, even to people who know the show?
Jabbar Raisani: The story that we wanted to tell was pretty clear from the season’s scripts, but at a certain point there’s also a little bit of push and pull with production. Because we wanted to physically build so many of these sets, it’s like, “Hey, you can only build X number of sets before you’re gonna not be able to build anymore.” So part of it comes down to — like, the drill tanks.
Boylan: RIP. They exist.
Raisani: We really wanted to do it. The plan is still presented in the world, but it’s one of those things where at the end of the day it came down to we just can’t fit this in. It was in until really late stage, and then we finally had to lift it out.
Boylan: That’s an amazing creative exercise. We took a whole episode about the drill and the way that we did it was a little bit different and then boiled it down to this pitch that Azula gives. I said to Elizabeth, “This is a whole episode. You’re pitching a real strategy. Azula never pitches anything that isn’t absolutely executable.” We know because we executed, so that was great for her. She had all of that to draw on.
Raisani: We try to do that anytime that we lose something. We try as much as we can to just put nods to the animated series, so fans know we wanted it in there too. We’re not just taking things out, like, “Oh, we don’t need this.” At a certain point, there’s only so much that we can fit.
“The Drill” episode was another arc I noticed was missing from the original show. What did that episode look like before you cut it?
Boylan: You want to know the secret about “kill your darlings”? It’s “cannibalize your darlings.” When someone comes up with a cool bit in an episode and you’re not going to do the episode anymore, you take that cool bit and you put it somewhere deep in Season 3. So, there’s a lot of stuff that we put into that episode that starts with Elizabeth’s speech and a whole bunch of stuff with Azula, Mai and Ty Lee. That friendship is very important to all of us. Female friendship on screen is very important, whether you are heroes or villains. A lot of the friendship stuff we pulled out of that episode and put into other episodes. We may have lost that bit, but our episode length got longer, so we managed to kind of cannibalize all the bits we love the most. I think the only thing that’s gone is the actual drill. Everything else is still there, whether it landed in Season 2 or Season 3. We found our favorite bits, jokes, all that stuff and pulled everything we could.
“The Painted Lady” was another arc from the original show’s third season that you moved into this Season 2. Why did you give Katara that storyline now?
Boylan: One of the first things I pitched was real locations, real sets, let’s get out in the world, I definitely want to do a Fire Nation succession story and “Painted Lady” makes much more sense in Season 2 because Katara is kind of done teaching Aang. So, what’s Katara doing? It was really important to me. One of her major drives is this need for justice. It’s something that I relate to really personally, and a lot of the writers did as well. We thought, “Let’s do this kind of like — a movie that some of them had never seen before — ‘Batman Returns.'” There are people in this city that need her help. We are not going to be traveling as much as the animated series can travel, so let’s show the disparity between the lower, middle and upper rings. She’s going to notice who is not getting taken care of before anybody else notices that. She’s used to doing stuff right out in the open, so for her to even try and hide herself — I’m really into shadow stories.
Shadows are not necessarily a negative part of our ourselves. A shadow is just another part of ourselves that maybe we’re not ready to show other people yet. And shadow integration stories; Zuko has that story with the Blue Spirit. Aang has that story. He is Aang, an air nomad, and he is also the avatar. He has to integrate all of those parts of himself over three seasons, so each of them gets sort of a mini arc. Toph has to integrate being a Beifong with being this rough, tough earthbender who is the blind bandit. Everyone’s got a shadow side. It’s just that Katara is a little more overt because she gets to put on makeup and dress up. So let’s put it here where she can do the most good and she didn’t have a natural arc, so we played that arc and wove it in with everybody else’s.
Raisani: When you have to do two seasons at the same time, one of the benefits is you can see how it can slot into Season 2 and the space that makes for Season 3. Because we knew where Season 3 was going to go, that allowed more space in Season 2.
Boylan: Katara’s got a big arc in Season 3.
There isn’t any sandbending or swampbending in this season either. Was there ever a point where you were going to show these other forms of bending?
Raisani: A part of it comes down to what we can fit in the season, and we just had to make certain choices. When we look at something like sandbending, there are probably some opportunities we could have integrated it into the story, but then we have a whole other kind of bending we have to R&D and execute. It starts to open up the spend down this path. If we’re trying to tell the most distilled version of the story that we can afford, which we wanted to be really, really powerful, we have to concentrate on those stories that are really at the heart and core of the overall story we’re going to tell.
Boylan: It comes back to cannibalizing it, though, because once we figured out we couldn’t do that, we went back to the character of Ba Sing Se. How does this inform the character of the city? These are all earthbenders. They expand the walls of the city as people join. The city and rings need to get bigger. They’ve taken over the land around it. Who’s to say what was there before Ba Sing Se expanded? We look to history a lot on this show. I like to think of it as a historical fantasy. So we looked at history and how cities would expand and make their walls higher. So not being able to do sandbending meant that we could tell more of the story of Ba Sing Se and make it more of a character.
If the CGI and special effects hadn’t shot the budget up, what would you have put in the show?
Boylan: Part of the creativity is you write to fit what you’ve got, no matter what. And then the game you play with yourself is how can we be as creative as possible within those boundaries?
Raisani: If you asked, “Would you do one or two more episodes?” Yeah, definitely, to tell a little bit more story. Let’s do some of the things that we couldn’t fit in and had a hard time cutting. We hated cutting stuff, like Bosco [the Earth King’s bear]. There is this painting of Bosco and we had a long series of jokes, and at the end of the day we’re like, “We can’t even put in the jokes.” The painting is great, because fans know that we are fans and we wanted to have that connection and hang on this painting for way too long. It’s a nice nod to the folks that feel passionate about those moments. It’s hard. Unless you can do it all and do it right, it’s weird to do a middle ground. We even did, “Is it a playpus bear, is it this bear?” It was too much to not have the actual bear, and you needed Bosco to do that whole run.
Boylan: Bosco was in there for a long time. There are a lot of creatures that are on the [cutting room] floor, a lot of joke runs, a lot of serious stuff. We try to keep the right balance.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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Originally published: June 04, 2026.
