The second season of Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender will reintroduce audiences to Toph Beifong, a 12-year-old blind Earthbender who becomes Aang’s teacher. Like with characters from the last season, the live-action version of Toph (played by Miya Cech) will come with some changes and tweaks.
During the red carpet for the sci-fi film Marshmallow, Cech talked about her approach to her upcoming role. Speaking with The Direct, she reiterated her Toph would be slightly older than her animated version—something first reported in January—and said she met with voice actor Michaela Murphy on their similar processes. She further revealed her Toph would be “slightly more feminine” than the original. ” I feel like I wanted to work into a very humanizing space for her because she was [originally] a cartoon.”
In the original Avatar, Toph grew up as the daughter of two wealthy Earth Kingdom aristocrats who kept her hidden because she was blind. When Aang, Sokka, and Katara first meet her, she’s moonlighting as a trashtalking wrestler named the Blind Bandit, and she’s a pain in the ass when she joins them. Several episodes are about her being overly blunt or beefing with someone else in the party–usually Katara–and both of them learning to vibe with each other better while still being themselves. One of their best moments as a duo comes in the anthology episode “Tales of Ba Sing Se,” where Katara takes her on a spa day and Toph acknowledges that she does like being feminine from time to time, just not all the time, a point that makes Cech’s approach to tweaking the character interesting.
The first season of Avatar also came with some baggage about its approach to characters: its big fundamental update to Sokka was making him less sexist because the creators “felt it might play a little differently [in live action],” said actor Ian Ousley in 2023. This caused a lot of heated discussion, because OG Sokka wasn’t constantly beilttling Katara for being a girl, he was just a dick sometimes, something he unlearned for the large part by the show’s fifth episode. Those who saw the live-action version felt removing his sexism made him, and by extension his eventual romance with Suki, substantially less interesting.
We’ll see how things shake out with Toph when Avatar: The Last Airbender comes back for season two.
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