It’s pretty crazy that Sigourney Weaver is going to be playing a teenager in James Cameron’s upcoming film Avatar: The Way of Water. In the story, she plays Kiri, the 14-year-old adoptive Na’vi daughter of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana).
Thanks to an interview with Empire, Weaver offers some details and insight into this new character and explains that she has a “deep love for all things in the world, creatures, plants, everything. This is also true when she’s underwater. She’s at ease in these natural environments and very comfortable with all the different creatures.”
In regards to her part in the story, she says: “It’s a touching story, because we have to leave our home and we have to leave the forest and go to this new environment. And I think what I loved about what Jim did was that she is a very typical adolescent. She’s very self-conscious, filled with all these emotions that come from being thrown into this new reality and missing home. So, I had a lot to think about as Kiri, and I had to work in a completely different way than I’ve ever worked. That was very exciting for me.”
It must have been really interesting a cool for Weaver to play a teenager, and when talking about how she actually prepared for the role, she said: “I think the way I started with Kiri was just standing, feeling my body bit by bit, as if I was fourteen. Just trying to get that feeling back in my body and always coming from there whenever I had a scene. So, it took some kind of rerouting of the way I work. But I had done this exercise in drama school where if you say your character has blue eyes, you wait until you feel as if you are looking through blue eyes. Every time you described something, you would add that on to your physical being and you weren’t expected to do anything or show anything. You just felt it and it kind of blossomed inside you. I found that exercise was extremely important getting into Kiri because I didn’t want to play an adolescent, I wanted to become an adolescent. And I didn’t want to become any adolescent. I wanted to become her.”
That sounds like quite the challenge, but it looks like she pulled it off! Weaver went on to say that she trained to hold her breath for up to six and a half minutes. She also said that shooting underwater was one of the more challenging things about shooting the movie, explaining: “I think the most challenging thing was that Jim would say, ‘Don’t look like you’re holding your breath, you have to be completely relaxed underwater.’ It was uncomfortable, but it was great, because we really had to become fish in a way.”
As for the expectations of the massive film, she explained that she and the rest of the creative team don’t want to let Cameron down. She goes on to say: “We don’t want to let the story down. We don’t want to let the audience down. So we have to really go for it every single day. I was so inspired by the work, not only of my fellow actors, but also of all the technicians. The bar is high with Jim. He can be very sarcastic if you screw up. Let’s put it that way — although he loves us so that’s behind it all.”
Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, “Avatar: The Way of Water begins to tell the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure.”
Avatar: The Way of Water hits theaters on December 14th, 2022.