Sigourney Weaver Explains How She Prepared To Play A Teenager In Avatar: The Way Of Water
Oh, James Cameron. What will he think of next?
Not only will "Avatar: The Way of Water" debut well over a decade after the original box office-smashing hit first arrived, but a number of familiar faces who we thought had kicked the bucket in the previous movie are set to join in on the action once more. First, there's the villain Miles Quaritch played by Stephen Lang, who will pull off his best Emperor Palpatine impression by "somehow" returning from the dead despite meeting his satisfying end near the end of the 2009 original. But even more improbably, the sequel is set to bring back Sigourney Weaver (who, you may or may not remember, portrayed the human scientist Dr. Grace Augustine in "Avatar") ... but as a completely different character altogether, and a young Na'vi at that. And that's not even the wildest part: She's playing the daughter of Jake Sully and Neytiri. No, I still don't quite get it, either!
In any case, Cameron has more than earned the right to do whatever he wants to do with his sequel to the highest-grossing movie of all time. For Weaver, that meant having to brush up on the finer points of playing a mo-cap teenaged character as a 73-year-old. As you can imagine, this proved to be quite the acting challenge.
In an interview with Empire, Weaver opened up about the process of portraying young Kiri, whom she described as "...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."
Read on for more details!
'I didn't want to become any adolescent. I wanted to become her.'
How does one possibly follow-up one of the most successful blockbusters of all time? Well, throwing a couple curveballs by bringing back an original actor to portray a wildly different character sure couldn't hurt! When asked by Empire how she prepared to play Kiri and whether it felt like going back to drama school, Sigourney Weaver responded with a very thoughtful answer:
"It's funny that you would say that because 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."
Though the legendary actor admitted that she was "quite thrown by Kiri a lot of the time," Weaver clearly relished the chance to flex her acting (and breath-holding) muscles while bringing this unique, youthful, and oftentimes "self-conscious" (as she put it) character to life.
"Avatar: The Way of Water" dives into theaters on December 16, 2022.