Has anyone in the wider Avatar-verse had as wild a ride as Sigourney Weaver? In James Cameron’s 2009 original, she played human scientist Grace Augustine, who perished before the credits rolled. But then, in Avatar: The Way Of Water, she returned in hugely surprising form – as Na’vi teenager Kiri, a seemingly miraculous conception birthed from Grace’s avatar, with Weaver donning performance-capture to play a 14-year-old. That film teased a bigger destiny for Kiri, who has a peculiar connection to the sprawling flora and fauna of Pandora – and it sounds like there’ll be much more to come in Avatar: Fire And Ash.
The film, Weaver tells Empire in a major new interview, is a darker outing than the previous sequel, as our heroes face new Na’vi antagonist, Varang. “There’s much more darkness because these are our own people fighting us, and all we have is each other, more than ever,” she says. And that darkness includes big repercussions for Kiri. “For my character, there’s a lot of realisations and discoveries,” Weaver teases. “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.”
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As Weaver explains in our latest Path To Pandora dispatch, the tone of Fire And Ash is just right for this moment. “When I first read two and three [The Way Of Water and Fire And Ash], three seemed, by contrast, very dark — and yet here we are in a very dark period on the planet,” she says. “I’m grateful for a filmmaker like Jim putting years into these stories, reminding us of who we really are, where we are. Like our democracy right now, we believed there were checks and balances. In fact, that isn’t happening, and you realise how much you’ve taken for granted — and now you have to fight. And that’s where we are with the planet, too. It’s an important lesson for us in America, and it’s an important lesson for us on Earth. You can’t just hope everything will be alright. You’ve got to actually take a stand.” The fight for Pandora has only just begun.