Sigourney Weaver knows her way around Pandora. The celebrated actress first joined James Cameron’s Avatar saga with the 2009 original film, starring as brilliant xenobotanist Dr. Grace Augustine. She later returned for 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water, this time playing the entirely new character Kiri — a young teenage Na’vi mysteriously born from Grace’s avatar.
Now, Kiri returns in the upcoming Avatar: Fire and Ash, a sprawling epic that finds her and her adoptive family facing off against a fiery new threat: the Mangkwan clan, led by the imperious Varang (Oona Chaplin).
“It’s a very different moment for the family, having lost the eldest son, Neteyam, and still not having a real home, and fighting for their country,” Weaver told Empire magazine in a new cover story. “There’s a lot more upheaval and unexpected new elements, like the Ash People, who are so completely opposite to the Na’vi. There’s much more darkness because these are our own people fighting us, and all we have is each other, more than ever. For my character [Kiri], there’s a lot of realizations and discoveries. She still has trouble connecting with the ancestors; the one thing the Na’vi people can count on is closed off to her and that’s confusing and upsetting. And because she’s half human, it makes her feel like she’s not part of them.”
Weaver also opened up about Kiri’s next chapter and how it’s been “healing” for her to play the young Na’vi woman.
“She’s a joy to play — and also, it’s a chance for me,” Weaver told Empire. “I was such a miserable 14-, 15-year-old. I was so insecure — and funny, so I managed to survive high school — but I didn’t have any real confidence. And it’s given me an opportunity to go back and re-enter that state of mind, be in it and trust myself in a different way [with] that character; find the little crumbs of me there in the character. I felt a lot of despair when I was 14 and 15, and Kiri and all of them feel despair because of what’s happening to their world. But she has more support, perhaps, than I did as a kid, and so I find it very healing, in a way, to play her.”
To fully bring their characters to life, Weaver and her costars spent months training, learning everything from free-diving to parkour techniques. For Weaver, it was especially important to train alongside her young costars, building that real-life Sully family camaraderie.
“It was very important to Jim that we do everything,” she said. “And I wanted to do all the things with the kids. The parkour was intense, the free-diving really was very intense. But I think, for me, as someone who’s about to turn 76, I can’t afford to do nothing, you know? I mean, I’m not a crazy person, but I do try to do something for an hour every day. I’ve always been like that, but now I have this extra motivation, because I don’t want to be an old crone by the time I get to [films] four and five.”
Catch Avatar: Fire and Ash only in theatres December 19, 2025. And revisit the first two films in the series, Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water, available to stream now on Disney+.
This information originally appeared in Empire magazine.
