Few movies have gotten as much backlash over the years as M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender, and Dev Patel hasn’t been shy about regretting being part of it. Through the years, there have been animated TV shows that have left their mark on the audience thanks to their story, characters, and humor, and one that is remembered fondly by the audience is Avatar: The Last Airbender, created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko. Set in a world where certain people can manipulate one of the four elements, only one, known as Avatar, can manipulate all, serving as a bridge between the physical and spiritual world and maintaining the balance between nations.
Avatar: The Last Airbender has been praised by critics and viewers over the years thanks to its characters, humor, cultural references, and the themes addressed in it, which weren’t seen often in cartoons aimed at a young audience. However, in 2010, Avatar made the jump to the big screen thanks to M. Night Shyamalan, with the intention of turning it into a trilogy, with each movie based on each season of the show, and it was one of the biggest failures of the decade. The Last Airbender is widely regarded as one of the worst movies ever made, with most criticism going towards its whitewashed cast and the story, and not even the cast have good things to say about it, as is the case of Dev Patel.
Right after starring in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Patel expanded his horizons with The Last Airbender. In it, he played Prince Zuko, a Fire Nation prince exiled by his father and ordered to capture the Avatar. Patel was cast as a replacement to Jesse McCartney, whose tour dates were said to clash with filming but he later claimed the producers replaced him for political reasons. The Last Airbender was Patel’s second biggest project, but it wasn’t a nice experience for him, and he has been quite vocal about it, even calling it “a little bit sh*t” when a fan gave him a poster to sign at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.
Aside from that, Patel has shared that starring in The Last Airbender taught him a big lesson about Hollywood. Speaking to THR in 2016, Patel explained that after starring in The Last Airbender he’s afraid of “those big studio movies”, as he felt overwhelmed by the experience and felt “like he wasn’t being heard”. He added that this was “really scary for him” and he learned the power of “no'' and to listen to his instinct “when you read those words for the first time”. Patel also said that, when watching his performance in The Last Airbender, he “saw a stranger on the screen”. Perhaps the pressure to make another big movie after the success of Slumdog Millionaire was too much that Patel took the role of Prince Zuko even if he wasn’t entirely sure of it, but the experience – while not a good one – surely taught him to choose his projects more carefully and listen to his instinct.
The following year, Patel starred in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and has since appeared in a variety of movies, as are Chappie, Lion, and most recently The Green Knight, as well as in the TV series The Newsroom and Modern Love. The Last Airbender is one of those movies that the audience might not forgive in the future as it didn’t do justice to the beloved cartoon and the whitewashing of the cast is one of its biggest flaws, but Dev Patel learned from that experience and has chosen his projects better ever since, separating himself from that failure.
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