Avatar: Fire and Ash director James Cameron says villain Quaritch is "undergoing an identity crisis" in the film, and teases a possible redemption: "Jake would rather have this guy on his side"

Steven Lang's Colonel Miles Quaritch is one of the most complicated characters of James Cameron's Avatar franchise, with shifting loyalties that are only exacerbated by his fate in Avatar: The Way of Water, in which Quaritch changed from a normal human into a "recombinant" Na'vi in a totally new body. According to Cameron himself, Quaritch's conflicted nature will be an important part of the upcoming Avatar: Fire and Ash.

"Quaritch is undergoing an identity crisis. His interest in the biological son of his biological precursor form is all about trying to define, 'Am I a completely new person? Am I bound by the rules and the behaviors of the person whose memories and personality I was imprinted with?' It's a true existential dilemma for him in the philosophical sense," Cameron tells Empire.

"He could connect, he could plug in — Jake wants him to," says Cameron. "I don't want to tell you where it goes, but we're gonna see all this play out, because Jake would rather have this guy on side," the filmmaker continues. "It's very uninteresting to just have two guys trying to kill each other for three movies, so it gets much snakier. Quaritch's soul is very much in play in movie three."

Avatar is one of the highest grossing movie franchises of all time, with the original 2009 film sitting at the top of the biggest earners ever, with 2023's Avatar: The Way of Water sitting in third place. The series focuses on the conflict between human colonists and the Indigenous Na'vi people of the ecologically diverse world of Pandora.

Avatar: Fire and Ash arrives in theaters December 19. In the meantime, check out our guide to all the upcoming movies coming in this year and beyond.