An Indigenous actress is suing director James Cameron and The Walt Disney Co, accusing Cameron of stealing her likeness when she was a teen to create the main character of Disney’s hit “Avatar” franchise — an extraordinarily lucrative film series about imperialistic theft of indigenous land, resources, and people.
Filed Tuesday by native Peruvian actress and activist Q’orianka Kilcher, the suit alleges that Cameron “extracted” Kilcher’s “facial features” from a photo of her playing Pocahontas in the 2006 movie “The New World” and “directed his design team to use it as the foundation for the character of Neytiri,” one of the “Avatar” franchise’s main characters. When “The New World” was filmed, Kilcher, now 36, was just 14.
“This case exposes how one of Hollywood’s most powerful filmmakers exploited a young Indigenous girl’s biometric identity and cultural heritage to create a record-breaking film franchise — without credit or compensation to her — through a series of deliberate, non-expressive commercial acts,” reads the suit, per NBC.
“The result was a hugely lucrative film franchise that presented itself as sympathetic to Indigenous struggles,” it adds, “all while silently exploiting a real Indigenous youth behind the scenes.”
According to NBC, the lawsuit includes evidence like Cameron’s initial sketches of the character Neytiri and interviews with Cameron and members of his production team in which they explicitly name Kilcher as the character’s visual inspiration. The “Avatar” franchise has gone on to make nearly $7 billion dollars at the global box office.
Kilcher says she didn’t consent to her likeness being used in any way, and had no idea that she’d been Cameron’s muse until after the first “Avatar” movie — which remains the highest-grossing film of all time — was released, when the “Titanic” director presented her with a framed sketch of Neytiri. Along with the sketch, Cameron allegedly wrote Kilcher a note reading that her “beauty was my early inspiration for Neytiri.”
“Too bad you were shooting another movie,” the note is said to continue. “Next time.” According to Kilcher, this exchange took place in 2010, a year after “Avatar” hit theaters; she would’ve been around 18 at the time.
Kilcher’s lawsuit further alleges that, despite Cameron’s note, his team never actually engaged her for the role. (The actress Zoe Saldaña has played Neytiri in the franchise.) It wasn’t until last year that Kilcher claims she understood the extent to which her face was extracted, when Cameron, in an interview in which he holds a Neytiri sketch, says that the “actual source for this was a photo in the LA Times, a young actress named Q’orianka Kilcher.”
“This is actually her… lower face,” Cameron’s explanation continues, per the suit. “She had a very interesting face.”
Per NBC, Kilcher’s lawsuit describes Cameron’s use of Kilcher’s face without her consent as “theft,” and describes the process of creating Neytiri as a “literal transplant of a real teenager’s facial structure into a blockbuster movie character.” It even also accuses Cameron and Disney of violating a newer deepfake porn law passed in California, arguing that because the Neytiri character is depicted in an intimate scene, Cameron and his team effectively created deepfaked child abuse imagery.
Cameron and Disney have yet to publicly respond to the suit. But Kilcher’s striking allegations are a reminder in our new AI-powered age that deepfakery and stolen likenesses are unfortunately nothing new — just easier than ever to create.
“It is deeply disturbing,” Kilcher said in a statement, according to NBC, “to learn that my face, as a 14-year-old girl, was taken and used without my knowledge or consent to help create a commercial asset that has generated enormous value for Disney and Cameron.”
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