Warning: This narrative contains spoilers for Avatar: Fire and Ash. Sigourney Weaver was keen to ensure that her rebirth in Pandora was not tainted by a particular interaction. The 76-year-old actress, who portrays Na'vi teenager Kiri in Avatar: Fire and Ash, elaborated on the intricacies behind her character's kissing scene with co-star Jack Champion, who was a teenager during the filming of the third installment.
"That scene where I say, 'You're perfect just as you are,' we had to be exceedingly delicate about it since it involved a kiss," Sigourney told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview published on December 20th. "Obviously, I wasn't going to kiss Jack, who was 14 or 15, in real life."
Indeed, Kiri—the adopted daughter of Sam Worthington's Jake Sully and Zoe Saldaña's Neytiri—and Jack's character Spider grew closer in the film. However, to appropriately explore their romantic arc, Weaver and director James Cameron asked her co-star, now 21, to "pick someone I could kiss and he did." "Then I imagined when I wasn't there, they picked someone appropriate for Jack," she recalled of their approach to their dynamic. "That concern about all of that, which is quite legitimate, was ongoing. And I'm glad the scene survived, because when I saw it, I believed it."
The Alien veteran continued, "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." According to Sigourney, this intimate scene was the only time they worked separately. Throughout the nearly three-year filming process, she had a front-row seat to Jack's portrayal as a "human boy" who connects with the Na'vi species, and she praised him for breathing life into his "interesting role."
"I thought Jack was just terrific in the film. It drives the whole film," she explained. "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."
Meanwhile, Jack noted that their creative chemistry helped him explore Spider's bond with Kiri. "When I first met Sigourney, I think we maybe had one scripted scene," he told Entertainment Weekly on December 20th. "But then for the next like 30 minutes, Sigourney and I just literally riffed. We really just used our imagination, and it was fun. Really, since the very beginning, Sigourney and I have been so locked in imaginatively that I've always been able [to] see Sigourney, then see Kiri."
