What you need to know
No, Sigourney Weaver didn’t kiss a teenager while filming a scene for Avatar: Fire and Ash.
In the third Avatar film, written and directed by James Cameron, Weaver, 76, will reprise her role as a Na’vi teenager named Kili, the adopted daughter of Zoe Saldaña’s Neytiri and Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully.
The CGI-altered character, who shares a playful romance with Pandora’s resident human spider, is played by 21-year-old Jack Champion, who filmed successive Avatar films between the ages of 14 and 16.
“There was a kiss in that scene, so I had to be very careful,” Weaver said in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “Of course I had no intention of kissing Jack in real life when he was 14 or 15.”
Mark Fellman/20th Century Studios
Cameron, 71, a longtime collaborator with the actress, recalled: “I asked Jack to choose someone he would be willing to kiss, and he did.” “And I imagine they chose the right person for Jack in my absence. The concerns about all of that were very legitimate.”
When Weaver saw the sweet scene, she said, “I believed it. There was so much honesty between us that I don’t think concerns about Jack’s real age and my real age have any place in it.”
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In Avatar, which began in 2009, Weaver played Dr. Grace Augustine, whose Avatar program allows humans to become Na’vi. After that character died in the first film, Weaver returned as Kili, a clone of the Doctor’s Navia Avatar.
Weaver told THR that she loved “hanging out” with the young actors playing her adoptive family, including Champion’s Spider. “She really enjoys being with him. I don’t know how tall he’s supposed to be, but he’s about 6 feet 4 inches, but he’s a whopping 5 feet 8 inches or so and I tower over him. You can really see that when you watch the movie.”
She added, “I’m a tall woman myself, so height doesn’t matter to me at all. I like that we’re a mismatch. It’s perfect.”
In an interview with PEOPLE, Cameron said that Fire and Ash’s romantic moment was shaped by his own experiences kissing girls taller than him in middle school.
“There was a lot of creative debate about whether Spider and Kili should maintain a brother-sister relationship,” the filmmaker said.
“So, I thought, no, I’m going to play an awkward young love story where I don’t know how to express it or how to deal with it,” he continued. “And I love the image of her kissing him at the top of the waterfall. She’s a head taller than him, so she had to bend down a little bit. My memory from seventh and eighth grade is that all the girls were taller than me, and that didn’t slow me down at all! I thought they were so cool even though they were bigger than me.”
Avatar: Fire and Ash is currently in theaters.
