Joel David Moore doesn’t sleep. At least not in a way that makes sense. He’s got two kids under five, three movies in the pipeline, a production company he co-founded with a hedge-fund guy, and oh yeah, he’s still Norm from Avatar, which means when James Cameron says jump, he straps into a mocap suit and jumps. “That’s my full-time job right there,” he says, half-joking about the kids. But he’s not really joking.
He’s been acting for over two decades, the kind of steady career that looks seamless from the outside but was, as he tells it, “a thousand no’s for every fifty credits.” His math is brutal: “At the beginning of my career, I’d audition two times a day. That means a thousand people told me no. That’s the business.” What kept him in the game wasn’t some delusion about being the best. “You don’t have to be the best. You just have to work harder than everybody else.”
Working harder meant slipping behind the camera early, co-directing Spiral in 2005 with Zachary Levi and Amber Tamblyn, and learning exactly how hard it is to call the shots. It also meant launching Balcony Nine, a production company that marries Moore’s entertainment world with his partner Rishi Bajaj’s finance pedigree. They literally named it after the balcony of Moore’s Chelsea apartment where the idea was hatched. “We wanted the intersection of our two worlds,” he says.
Balcony Nine isn’t churning out anonymous content. It’s pitching films with inclusivity and environmental awareness baked into the DNA. “Hollywood talks a big game about diversity, but we’re not as progressive as we like to think,” he says. “Almost half of our slate is female-driven, either with a woman at the top as writer or director. That’s not easy. Why isn’t it easy? Because it wasn’t established 30 years ago.” He remembers shadowing one of the only female directors on Bones—a rarity that shouldn’t have been a rarity. “She was having to fight for a position she shouldn’t have to fight for. That’s the imbalance we’re still correcting.”
Speaking of Bones: yes, he remembers the surreal episode where his character sat around watching Avatar. A Fox project inside a Fox project. “Very meta,” he laughs. John Landau, producer of Avatar, made the call himself. “If Bones was on right now, we’d do another crossover for Way of Water.”
Which brings us back to Pandora. To outsiders, returning after 13 years felt like a resurrection. To Moore, it was just part of a marathon. “Very early on, within a year of the original release, we knew sequels were being discussed. First it was one. Then it was two. Then those two got split into four.” He’s been rehearsing, doing early tech tests, and watching storyboards for over six years. He even brought his infant son to set, now immortalized as a Na’vi baby. “He was three months old. He’s five now. That’s how long we’ve been at this.”
Moore nerds out hardest on the tech. He’ll talk about “falloff” in the backgrounds of the first Avatar versus the seamless depth of Way of Water like a guy geeking over a new graphics card. “There’s no falloff. And think about where the next one’s going to be in two years. This is a growing art form. Nobody’s doing what Jim’s doing.”
The movie wrecked him emotionally. “I was bawling. I called my wife afterward, just needing to hear from the kids. Fathers around the world felt that.” For a film built on pixels, Moore insists it’s the richness of detail frame by frame that carries the emotion. “That’s what makes you hug your kid in the parking lot after.”
He knows his character Norm doesn’t command the spotlight, but he’s not worried. “There’s a fun journey ahead,” he teases. The Sully family may drive the saga, but Norm’s alive, well, and apparently due for more. He can’t say much, but he doesn’t have to—he’s been in this business long enough to know how to keep moving. Thousand no’s, fifty credits, and one balcony view that turned into an empire.
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
