The “Avatar: Fire and Ash” star explains why he keeps coming back to Quaritch and his criteria to do a sequel.

*Avatar *star Stephen Lang on Quaritch and his long history of masculine roles: ‘I left the man club some years ago’

The "Avatar: Fire and Ash" star explains why he keeps coming back to Quaritch and his criteria to do a sequel.

By Nick Romano

Nick Romano is a senior editor at ** with 15 years of journalism experience covering entertainment. His work previously appeared in *Vanity Fair*, Vulture, IGN, and more.

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December 19, 2025 1:00 p.m. ET

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Stephen Lang plays Quaritch in 'Avatar: Fire and Ash'. Credit:

Jeff Spicer/Getty; 20th Century Studios

Early in his career, Stephen Lang found himself in a similar club as the Jon Bernthal and Frank Grillo types, actors who exude a specific kind of alpha male, hyper-machismo energy through their onscreen roles. But then, he gave them all variation: Quaritch in the *Avatar* films (including this weekend's *Fire and Ash*), "the Blind Man" in two *Don't Breathe *movies, Yeager Dragunov in this year's *Sisu* sequel, etc.

Perhaps that nuance he finds across similar-sounding characters is why, even if Lang is cast in an archetypal part, he's still so entertaining to watch. Sitting in Disney's Manhattan headquarters earlier this week, sporting a purple velvet blazer and grey turtleneck for the winter holiday season, the New York native shares his philosophy around masculinity.

"I left the man club some years ago," he begins. "My sons are beautiful guys, and my daughters are extremely amazing humans, as is my wife. I have no interest in promoting some idea of masculinity that is either aggressive or more important than anyone else. I play it. I love playing it. I enjoy it. But I, I don't want to ever be thought of as some lunkhead male who's promoting some form of alpha masculinity 'cause that's not who I am and not what I want to do."

It's not, he continues, who Quaritch is either. "He acknowledges the power of the women in his life, acknowledges Mrs. Sully as one tough cookie," Lang remarks of his *Avatar* character. "His former partner, who is the mother of Spider [Jack Champion], she was a tough cookie. If I'm getting typed in some way, I don't mind it because the roles are good. But as I'm, in a way, segueing into older roles, for obvious reasons — and I like that too! I don't mind getting old. I just want to stay old for a really long time."

Lang, 73, doesn't always do sequels. Historically, he's only done a handful of them, and Quaritch is right at the top of his list in that regard. *Avatar: Fire and Ash* (out now) is his third time playing the character for director James Cameron. The deciding factor seems to be whether he feels completely finished with a character.

Stephen Lang in 'Public Enemies'.

Forward Pass/Kobal/Shutterstock

FBI Agent and war veteran Charles Winstead from 2009's *Public Enemies* is one role he's always wished he could've done more with, "a character I would've loved to play in a series," Lang says.

Another is Shrike, a former soldier reanimated as an undead cyborg, in 2018's *Mortal Engines*. "I'd signed on to do three of them," he mentions of what was to be a new Peter Jackson trilogy. "And, of course, it didn't work out for whatever reason, but that character I found very moving."

With *Avatar*, however, "There's no one like Quaritch," the actor adds.

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In the first film, released in 2009, Lang arrived as a military enforcer fighting on behalf of the RDA to colonize the planet of Pandora for mankind. He died by the time the end credits rolled, but Cameron brought him back in *Avatar: The Way of Water* (2022). Quaritch's digitized consciousness was uploaded into a Na'vi avatar body so he could continue chasing down Jake (Sam Worthington), Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and the rest of the Sully family.

Now in *Avatar: Fire and Ash*, Quaritch is forced to more actively grapple with his last remaining tie to his human self: Spider, the son he conceived off camera prior to his Na'vi transformation and who has since joined the Sully family. "There's all kinds of ways to go with that character," Lang remarks. "I just love playing him. I guess the criteria [for doing sequels] is, 'Is there more to say?'"

Quaritch approaches the Ash People in 'Avatar: Fire and Ash'.

20th Century Studios

An internal mantra for Lang when it comes to characters like this: If he can't love them, nobody will. He points to Igor Draganov, his character in *Sisu: Road to Revenge*, a Soviet Red Army officer who's responsible for creating the myth around the title character when he killed the family of Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila). Lang's in was that villain's upbringing as a child of the state, who had everything taken from him.

"Every character has an aspect like that," he explains. "Quaritch is far more interesting because there's so many good qualities to Quaritch. And yet, there is this streak — more than a streak — of brutality and of callousness and of cruelty."

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The character, and therefore Lang, can project all of those things and then, moments later, perform an ayahuasca-esque trip inside a Na'vi hut. You can tell that Lang is having a blast playing up the hallucinogenic experience, but even then, he relates it back to character study. A quote that poet Walt Whitman said about himself comes to mind: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."

Lang is attracted to that quote. "As humans, we do contradict ourselves all the time. Our behavior is not consistent," he says. "Our loves, our hates, everything like that, they can change. So I just like to stay on my emotional toes with the character to see where it goes."**

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