Sigourney Weaver is clearing the air about a kiss between her and Jack Champion’s characters in Avatar: Fire and Ash.
“That scene where I say, ‘You’re perfect just as you are,’ we had to be very delicate about that scene because it included a kiss,” Weaver, 76, told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview published on Saturday, December 20. “Obviously, I wasn’t going to kiss Jack, who was 14 or 15, in real life.”
Weaver returned in the third Avatar film to play Kiri, a Na’vi teenager who is also the adopted daughter of Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and Jake Sully (Sam Worthington).
At one point in the film, which hit theaters on Friday, December 19, Weaver’s CGI character shares a kiss with Spider (Champion), a teenage human Pandora dweller. Champion, now 21 years old, was a teenager himself when he filmed Avatar: The Way of Water and Fire and Ash back-to-back.
Instead of kissing Champion, Weaver said that the filmmakers “asked Jack to pick someone” more age-appropriate whom she could kiss for the scene.
“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,” Weaver continued. “And I’m glad the scene survived, because when I saw it, 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.”
Weaver first appeared in 2009’s Avatar as Dr. Grace Augustine, who created an avatar program to allow humans to become Na’vi. Following the character’s death in the first film, the Alien star returned as Kiri, the clone of Dr. Augustine’s avatar.
Sigourney Weaver as Kiri, Jack Champion as Miles ‘Spider’ Socorro 20th Century Studios / Courtesy Everett Collection
“I thought Jack was just terrific in the film,” Weaver gushed of her costar. “It’s such an interesting role. It’s also the role that [director James Cameron] put in after he’d written two, three, and four. He had told me about this human boy before he started writing it, and I guess at a certain point he went for it. It just drives the whole film, that incredible tension in a mixed-race family where the parents have completely opposite feelings and the children don’t have those feelings. I thought it would really resonate in our complicated world.”
Cameron, 71, explained to People that the kiss between Kiri and Spider was inspired by his personal experiences with kissing girls who were often taller than him in middle school.
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There was a lot of controversy creatively for us around whether Spider and Kiri should stay kind of brotherly-sisterly,” he told the outlet. “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.”
Cameron 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 now playing in theaters.
