Sigourney Weaver isn’t new to bold storytelling, but even she’s surprised by how timely the Avatar franchise continues to be. Playing Kiri, the soulful Na’vi teen with a mystical connection to nature, Weaver found herself diving deep into themes that felt just as urgent on Earth as they do on Pandora in the new film, Avatar: Fire and Ash.

“I’m as amazed as you are that these scripts that he wrote in 2011 and ’12 resonate so strongly,” she told Blavity’s Shadow and Act during our recent cast interview. “We have war now, we have refugees, we have homelessness, we have mixed-race families, and we have unprocessed grief, because in our society it’s like, ‘Hurry up, get over that.’ In other societies, they respect grief, and they realize that it takes a lot of time to process these things.”

Weaver said that playing Kiri — a character whose spiritual connection to Pandora’s ecosystem shapes her identity — was grounded in something real. “It is a privilege to work on these movies for so many reasons,” she said, “to play a character who has this strong connection to nature and fellow creatures.”

That connection, she shared, goes back decades. “I started to feel that connection when I played Dian Fossey [Gorillas in the Mist], and I was with the gorillas every day. It was like, ‘Wow, this is the greatest thing I’ve ever experienced.’ And so, all these things help me with Kiri.”

She called the final result a powerful cinematic experience. “I just feel like we’re sending a great movie out into the world, a great experience, flying on the ikran from the clouds down into the sea, and all this amazing stuff. He’s outdone himself again, which is hard to believe. It’s these themes that he doesn’t shy away from about all these challenges that people are having, even in a paradise like Pandora.”

Finding Kiri during this time

Weaver revealed that her performance in Fire and Ash was deeply shaped by what she went through when she was Kiri’s aege. “I think for me, the biggest surprise was that that time in my life was a really unhappy time and I was away from home. My parents were somewhere else,” she said. “And I really had to learn what Kiri learns, which is kind of having the courage to make your way through.”

Growing up without a safety net

That same emotional arc plays out through the film’s younger characters — something Weaver found incredibly relatable. “That’s what the kids learn in this story,” she said. “They all come into their own, but it’s because Mom and Dad aren’t around to help them and rescue them. They have to rely on each other and rely on themselves.”

She described that kind of growth as both terrifying and transformative. “That’s so scary, I think, when you’re that age — or at least it was for me — to think, ‘I can do that? No, no, no. I can’t do anything like that.’ And then you have to. And then you go, ‘Wow, I guess I can do that.’”

Filming those scenes alongside the younger cast made it even more meaningful. “I just think it’s such an amazing time in your life. And it was amazing to shoot that with the kids that are now almost grown-ups.”