Sigourney Weaver Prepared To Play A Teen In Avatar: The Way Of Water By Going Back To High School

This post contains spoilers for "Avatar: The Way of Water."

"Avatar: The Way of Water" is in theaters now, and it marks yet another wonderful collaboration between our beloved Sigourney Weaver and her "Aliens" James Cameron. If you haven't been paying attention to the trailers and press tours for the long-awaited "Avatar" sequel, you might be wondering how this is possible. Yes, Weaver's character in the first film, Dr. Grace Augustine, did not live through the epic battle against the RDA in defense of the Na'vi people. But, in this sequel set years after the original, Weaver has another role to play — and it might be one of her most ambitious roles yet.

In "The Way of Water," Weaver plays Kiri, the adopted teenage daughter of Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) who appears to have a mysterious origin. Unlike other Na'vi, she's a hybrid, and seems to believe that she was birthed from Grace Augustine's Avatar body, which inactively sits in a tank in a Na'vi research lab. Who is Kiri's father? How did this happen? We don't have all the answers just yet.

Embodying a 14-year-old Kiri was a rewarding risk for Weaver, now 73. "It was fun. It was challenging, but it was — I loved my character," she told BBC Radio about the experience. Weaver even admitted that part of her process of preparing to play Kiri involved going back to high school and observing teenage behavior.

As the sky people return once again to colonize Pandora and cloned Quaritch (Stephen Lang) is determined to hunt and defeat Jake, the Sully clan is quickly forced to leave the Omaticaya tribe and find a new home. With a full set of human fingers and a heavy sense of connection to the natural world around her, Kiri finds herself dealing with some angst as she struggles to fit into her new surroundings. "Luckily, a lot of layers are specified in the scripts. And she's so different from everyone else." Weaver shared, "But I felt there was great heart in it, and she's quite a gentle character, which stands out in a movie like this."

On set, Weaver initially experienced some anxiety trying to emotionally connect to Kiri, but Cameron maintained belief in the actress's inner child coming through. For Weaver, going back to high school and attending classes helped her find her inner 14-year-old:

"And I had a long time, because we kept postponing, beginning to refind my 14-year-old, and spend time in classes with that age group, and listen to the pitch of their voices and all that stuff [...] Luckily I'm just sitting in the background, just observing, trying to be invisible."

The research paid off. Though it's a strange choice on paper, what Weaver's performance and the VFX team accomplished in tandem with each other made Kiri one of the strongest and most compelling characters in "The Way of Water." As Kiri, Weaver switches between youthful innocence and melancholic vulnerability with ease, perfectly capturing the duality of adolescence. Weaver's Kiri is a perfect example of the unlimited potential of motion capture performance, where physical appearance can be altered to uncover emotional truth.