Allow Marc Maron to regale you with tales of his “ridiculous” Avatar audition
Maron auditioned for Avatar: The Way Of Water, and all he got was some cigars
Alright, what the fuckers, what the fuck buddies, what the fuck-atars. Appearing on stage at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, WTF host Marc Maron joined Happy Sad Confused’s Josh Horowitz to talk Tar, and we don’t mean Lydia. Marc Maron, a guy who admittedly didn’t “even remember the first” Avatar and doesn’t seem to care about the colonization of Pandora, auditioned for James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way Of Water and lived to tell the tale. But before he could even ask Cameron who his guys were, Maron had to wrestle with a “ridiculous” audition that led him to wonder, “Why the fuck would I want that job?”
“There’s this assumption that we’re going to do four Avatar movies. Dude, I don’t even remember the first one!” Maron said. Reading the script didn’t help because Maron didn’t “know what this all means to the world.” Maron recalls going down to Cameron’s Long Beach studio, where “there’s people doing acrobatics, there’s people flying. It’s like Cirque du Soleil down there.”
“So you go in, and [Cameron] gives you the script, and he’s like, ‘Uh, can I have your, you know, you can’t take a picture of [the script]. This doesn’t leave the building, this script.’ I’m, like, ‘Okay, man.’” Maron continues, “[Cameron’s] like, ‘Go take a look, uh, look it over because, you know, you’re here. You might as well just read for this today.’ I’m, like, “Okay, man.” To be a fly on the wall in that Long Beach compound, “the only cool part” of which, to Maron’s mind, is “a museum of James Cameron,” a room that houses the Titanic model and “some other stuff from the other movies.” As Horowitz put it, Maron’s a “big fan.”
Things didn’t get any less weird when the cameras were rolling. “All of a sudden, you’re in this zone with these people that he just has around down there to read parts and fly and be on dollies,” he said. “I’m on camera, I think. I got a picture of whatever the fuck it is, a boat or whatever. I’m in the middle of this thing, and I’m totally untethered, and I have no sense of character. I don’t know really what’s happening around me other than there are several unidentified actor people and acrobats all around me.”
As we all know, Maron didn’t get the part. Instead, it went to Jemaine Clement from Flight Of The Conchords, which was fine by Maron. “Thank god,” the comedian said. “Here’s the fucked up thing about me and acting: I don’t like being away from home. It’s not my bag. I got anxious being there for a week. What am I going to eat?”
“My agent was like, ‘You’re probably going to go to New Zealand for four years,’ or whatever the fuck it was. Some ridiculous amount of time. I was like, it’s not happening, and I have no problem with it. I had nothing invested in it other than the experience of, like, all right; I’ll go take the meeting. Then [Cameron] sent me a box of cigars because he didn’t cast me. Okay, that’s nice. At this age, I have no problem saying no.”
“Like I would’ve had to go to New Zealand for a year, and people would’ve been like, ‘Were you even in it?’” Maron replied. “But Jemaine lives in New Zealand! He has family there. It was a no-brainer.”
As hard as it is to believe, it doesn’t sound like Jake Sully will be stopping by the garage any time soon.
(via Variety)