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Oona Chaplin stars in James Cameron's new Avatar installment, Fire and Ash
The granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin, the actress once considered changing her name, she revealed in an interview
"It's been a journey to feel deserving, because I know that doors have opened for me that potentially wouldn't have opened if I wasn't associated with this brilliant man," Oona said of the late Charlie
Avatar: Fire and AshstarOona Chaplinonce considered changing her name to distance herself from her famous grandfather: filmmaking pioneer Charlie Chaplin.
"It's been a journey to feel deserving, because I know that doors have opened for me that potentially wouldn't have opened if I wasn't associated with this brilliant man," Oona, 39, toldThe Timesin a recent interview.
"It's definitely tricky to feel undeserving of the place you're in," the actress said, adding that she considered changing her name upon graduation from London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
PerThe Times, Oona shifted her mindset "from guilt to gratitude by working really hard and knowing that whatever I do is never going to compare to what my grandfather did."
courtesy of 20th Century Studios
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Oona said she also considers keeping her given name an extension of the legacy of the silent-film icon, who died in 1977 before she was born.
"If all my purpose in this realm is for people to say, 'Oh, Charlie Chaplin's granddaughter,' and they google him and watch a movie of his, then I'm happy because he's such a genius."
Charlie's fourth wife was Oona O'Neill, daughter of legendary playwright Eugene O'Neill, from whom theAvatarstar gets her first name. Oona was born in Madrid, Spain to English-American actress Geraldine Chaplin and Chilean filmmaker Patricio Castilla, and grew up all over the world, including the U.K., Switzerland and Cuba. She had settled in the latter country whenJames Cameron's thirdAvatarfilm became a possibility.
"I pretty much kind of was practicing quitting acting and I built myself a tree house in the jungle in Cuba, and I was like, I'm going to live here now, so I'm done," Oona told PEOPLE before the release ofFire and Ash.
"It made me fall in love with acting again," she said of playing the movie's villainous Varang. "It helped me also develop this immense gratitude for my profession and for the gift of telling stories that I'd kind of forgotten about."
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As for theAvatarmovies' connection to her groundbreaking grandfather, Oona points out there are "a lot of parallels."
Both Charlie and Cameron, 71, were "working with cutting-edge technology. They're both telling stories in innovative ways, but they both are absolutely rooted and centered in the human heart and the human condition."
Avatar: Fire and Ash, starringZoe Saldaña,Sam Worthington,Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang and more, is in theaters now.
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