Photos: Lindsey Byrnes @lindseybyrnes
Styling: Branden Ruiz @branden.ruiz
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Story: Sloane Polhemus @donnadeverona
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Bringing Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Toph Beifong into live action was never going to be easy. Beloved for her headstrong attitude, formidable fighting skills, and groundbreaking disability representation, Toph carried nearly two decades of expectations from audiences around the world.
But Miyako was ready for the challenge. After months of intensive preparation—and with a profound commitment to honoring the character—the 19-year-old actress stepped fully into Toph’s world.
Filming in vision-obscuring contact lenses, navigating stunt choreography barefoot, and working closely with blindness consultants, Miyako delivers one of the adaptation’s standout performances—and marks a pivotal new chapter in her own career.
A lot of audiences have really connected with your portrayal of this fan-favorite character. What has it been like to have your performance speak to so many people?
Our premiere was also a fan event, so when I saw the amount of people who were there, I just felt really grateful and really honored to be a part of it. It’s obviously a huge honor, especially because it’s an Asian-centric show, it’s about a lot of Asian cultures. So I felt a huge responsibility to uphold what it meant, and why it meant so much, to so many people. You know, my AAPI community, that’s my family right there. And the blindness and disability community has been really appreciative about how respectfully we treated Toph, and how we made her so relatable and we didn’t make her blindness something that was a big thing. Because it never was in the animated series. And I think seeing that in a real person is really powerful.
I would imagine there’s a lot of preparation behind playing Toph; you have to understand what it would be like to live with blindness, you have to learn all sorts of stunts and choreography for the earthbending scenes, and you have to bring to life this character that’s already been established in the animated series. So, how did you prepare to play Toph?
I spent six weeks in training with our blindness consultant Joe Strechay and his assistant, Cara Lee Hrdlitschka. I don’t think I would have been able to go into filming as Toph and portray the character accurately and respectfully, with as much confidence as I did, without them. I will never know what it’s like to be blind, I will never have that experience. So to be with somebody who does, and who is more focused on giving me an education on the subject as a whole, rather than just training me, was part of the reason I felt so comfortable. During those six weeks I was in Toph training, which is what we called the stuff with Joe, and then I was in stunts, and then I would be in acting rehearsals. I think the hardest part was actually putting all of the skills I was learning separately together.
Watching this show, there’s a lot of really impressive sets, stunts, and practical effects. What was it like filming in those environments?
A lot of our show was practical, which I appreciate greatly. I had heard from the others about the season one sets, which was all, like, a volume. And i just couldn’t imagine, because Toph — and eventually my performance through her — are so tactile. And I needed a physical response that I probably couldn’t have done most of the things I did, especially filming with those contacts in, without the physical sets.
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Did you have a favorite scene to film?
I think the Spirit Library stuff was really fun. A lot of people were a little confused about our changes to that storyline, but I think it gives us more insight into certain characters. In the animated series, Toph can’t read or write. But blind people in the modern day and age absolutely can, so having that as a facet of her life where she is more modern in that way — I really appreciated them taking the time to put that in. There’s also a big moment right after that where Toph holds up the Spirit Library, and when we were filming that, that’s all a practical effect. So the wall was actually falling, and where I stuck my hands into the wall was, like, a foam block that they cut little slits into. So I could actually stick my hands into the wall while the effect was going. And then our first AD and our director were making all the Appa noises, because we don’t have an Appa in real life. So like, all I heard was them just making Appa noises into the microphone for my cues, which I thought was really funny.
I saw they made fake silicone feet for you to wear while filming, because Toph as a character is always barefoot. What was it like to film with those?
People think I was just wearing fake feet all the time, but they actually only made one pair. I saw somewhere they were like, ‘they made 20 pairs.’ And I was like, ‘there were? Since when?’ Like, no, they made one and I wore them maybe twice. It’s a fun gag, but I don’t think they were used as much as people think they were. I will say the silicone feet were kind of funny. They needed to be insulated enough where, in the Vancouver cold when we’re stuck in the mud, I can be warm. And they also needed to be thick and solid enough where if I stepped on a rock, it wouldn’t puncture through and hurt my foot. It just led to them being really huge on me. The silicone feet are a model of my foot, so it looks like my feet, just, like, times ten. They ended up looking really really big on camera. When we were doing the Spirit Library stuff, it had snowed a couple nights before, so they were like, maybe you should wear your fake feet for this, and I was like, I don’t think I should do that at all. But I did for a couple takes, and one of our directors, Amit Gupta, wanted to shoot a shot of just my feet earthbending, and he was like, ‘they’re grotesque.’ And I was like, I’m gonna take them off.
Dress. Blumarine
Was it important to you to be authentic to the character in that way?
I was very committed to the idea that Toph is barefoot. And if I was gonna do this the way I wanted to do this, I needed to be barefoot. I was like, I wanna try being barefoot, I wanna try doing this with the head angles and the eye movements we talked about, and I want to try doing it with the physicality we’ve established for this character. Same thing with stunts. I tried my best to be barefoot in those stunt rehearsals, and to learn the choreography by feeling.
How much influence did you have over your character?
I would say we were all very collaborative. Everybody had their own opinions about what their character would do, because I think all of us, for this season, upped the ante big time. And we really wanted to develop these characters into people that we could step into. Physicality was always up to us, blocking was always up to us, which I thought was really fun. Actually, some of the smaller martial arts things that you see us do — the smaller bending moves — were actually somewhat up to us, especially if they weren’t too complicated. The stunt team would just be like, ‘what do you think they would do?’ And they would combine our idea artistically with tradition from martial arts or wushu, which I thought was really really cool and something I hadn’t seen before on sets. So I think we had enough to where the characters — when we see it, we know what things were us, and what things were the script, which I think is fun.
Are there any lessons you took away from playing Toph?
I grew up a lot on this show, not just physically but also just emotionally and mentally. I grew in my craft, in my work ethic. I think I achieved a new level of dedication to authenticity to characters that I hadn’t previously seen in myself. I grew as a person filming this, being a part of this kind of big project, and filming two seasons back to back. I think Toph also taught me a lot about becoming more confident in myself. Toph is a very I-am-who-I-am person, and I feel like I didn’t have a lot of that, so I feel like she gave a little bit of that to me.
Obviously Avatar is the big thing right now, but what’s next for you?
I was off the acting scene for two years filming Avatar, which was a long experience, and the family that I got through that was really exciting and comfortable. I do think that right now I’m kind of branching off into new things, a new era of myself and my personal brand as well as my career. You know, I’ve kind of entered into the young adult/teen scene, because I’ve always been a kid before this. So like, I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity on the horizon, but that comes with a lot more pressures, challenges, and responsibilities. I’m excited to see what I do next.
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