NEED TO KNOW
No, Sigourney Weaver didn’t kiss a teenager while filming that scene in Avatar: Fire and Ash.
The third Avatar installment from writer-director James Cameron brings back Weaver, 76, as a Na’vi teenager named Kiri, the adopted daughter of Zoe Saldaña’s Neytiri and Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully.
The CGI-altered character shares a playfully romantic smooch with human Pandora dweller Spider, played by 21-year-old Jack Champion, who filmed back-to-back Avatar installments between the ages of 14 and 16.
“We had to be very delicate about that scene because it included a kiss,” Weaver told The Hollywood Reporter in a recent interview. “Obviously I wasn’t going to kiss Jack, who was 14 or 15, in real life.”
Mark Fellman/20th Century Studios
The actress and her longtime collaborator Cameron, 71, “asked Jack to pick someone I could kiss and he did,” she recalled. “Then I imagine when I wasn’t there, they picked someone appropriate for Jack. That concern about all of that, which is quite legitimate, was going on.”
When Weaver saw the sweet scene, she said, “I believed it. It’s so genuine between the two of them and any concern about Jack’s real age and my real age, I think there’s no room for it there.”
Disney
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In 2009’s franchise-launching Avatar, Weaver played Dr. Grace Augustine, whose avatar program enables humans to become Na’vi. After that character died in the first film, Weaver returned as Kiri, the clone of the doctor’s Na’vi avatar.
Weaver told THR that she loved “frolicking” with the young actors playing her adopted family, including Champion’s Spider. “She enjoys his company so much. I don’t know how tall I’m supposed to be, like 6’4, and he’s what, 5’8 or something, and I tower over him — and you can really see it in the film.”
She added, “Being a tall woman myself, height doesn’t matter at all. I love that we’re mismatched. It’s perfect.”
Speaking to PEOPLE, Cameron said it was his own experiences in middle school with kissing girls — often taller than him — that informed Fire and Ash’s romantic moment.
“There was a lot of controversy creatively for us around whether Spider and Kiri should stay kind of brotherly-sisterly,” the filmmaker said.
“And I thought, no, let’s play that awkward young love thing where they don’t really know how to express it or confront it,” he continued. “And I just love that image when she kisses him at the waterfall and she’s a head taller than him and she has to kind of bend down. My memory of the seventh and eighth grade was all the girls were taller than me, and it didn’t slow me down at all! I thought they were very cool, even though they were bigger than me.”
Avatar: Fire and Ash is in theaters now.
