Sigourney Weaver’s Dr. Grace Augustine played a huge role in 2009’sAvatar. A brilliant xenobotanist behind the Avatar Program on Pandora, the scientist met an unfortunate end at the hands of Colonel Quaritch and was unable to have her consciousness transferred to her Avatar.
Though that seemed like the end of the line for Weaver’s involvement in the epic sci-fi franchise, the actress says that her surprising role inAvatar: The Way of Waterhas been in the works just as long as the hotly-anticipated sequel.
In an interview withComicBook.com, Weaver shared how she and director James Cameron met up for lunch shortly afterAvatar’srelease to discuss bringing the actress back in a very different role.
“We had lunch together in 2010 and part of the reason we had lunch is we kind of wanted to spitball about this idea that maybe there’d be a girl character who had a relationship with Grace but that she felt more at home in the forest…So, we kind of talked about some basic thoughts about her,” she said.
The brainstorming led to Kiri, the biological daughter of Grace’s Na’vi Avatar, adopted by Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña).
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While Kiri’s adoptive siblings—Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), Tuktirey (Trinity Bliss), and Miles “Spider” Socorro (Jack Champion)—hadn’t fully been fleshed out at that point, Cameron knew he wanted Weaver to return.
And according to the actress, the director had no reservations about casting her in the role of a14-year-old girl.
“We didn’t know about Spider and we certainly didn’t know any of the specifics, but just the idea, and Jim is crazy enough to cast me as a 14-year-old and as he said that day and several times afterward, ‘This is your natural age. You are 14, you are that immature. I know that about you.”
Though Weaver, 73, wasn’t entirely sold on Cameron’s “crazy” idea at first, the director helped to soothe her fears and figure out how to approach the much younger character—a process that involved tapping into her inner teenage girl.
“He [Jim] also knows that I’m a clown. And, and so I don’t think he was as worried as I was when he told me, I was like, ‘Alright, how am I gonna do this?’ But luckily I had plenty of time to figure out not only how to do it, but how I wanted to do it, which was not imitating a 14-year-old, but really finding, unearthing my unhappy 14-year-old in some ways and letting her exist in this space,” the actress added.
