‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ star Dallas Liu talks about how his background in martial arts helped him in his role as Prince Zuko. In this video, Dallas shares with EW’s Gerrad Hall about how his martial arts experience allowed him to focus less of his time on a scene’s choreography and more so on his own character moments. Taped live at Netflix FYSEE’24.
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00:00of the Fire Nation, but also a very skilled firebender,
00:04which requires a lot of stunts along the way,
00:07and luckily you do have a background in martial arts,
00:10so I'm curious how that helped win learning
00:13your fight choreography, but on the flip side,
00:17what was the most challenging aspect
00:18of then actually trying to show what firebending
00:22would look like on screen?
00:24It helped in a lot of different ways,
00:26but I think it helped the most on the days,
00:29because of the background that I have
00:32and the amount of time that I was doing martial arts,
00:35I think it allowed for me on set to worry less
00:38about the choreography and focus in more
00:40on the character moments and the person
00:43that he would be fighting.
00:45So for me, it was like my bread and butter,
00:49something that felt very second nature to me,
00:52which I'm thankful for all those years
00:54that my mom put me through, because now I get to work
00:58on this show amongst these amazing actors and actresses,
01:02and then working with Jeff, who allowed me to help
01:08and be a part of the creative process
01:10of each of the fights that Zuko has.
01:13I guess the one thing in particular
01:14that was challenging was probably the costume.
01:18A lot of the Fire Nation and even the Water Tribes,
01:22their costumes are so heavy,
01:23and there's so many thick layers of leather.
01:25I was ripping through pants every fight,
01:27and they had doubles on standby ready to go all the time.