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Sigourney Weaver responds to backlash surrounding 55-year age gap kiss in new Avatar

Jack Champion was 14/15 when they filmed it

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Kieran Galpin
23rd December 2025, 14:52
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Sigourney Weaver has addressed the now-viral moment her character in Avatar: Fire and Ash kissed Spider, whose actor is 55 years her junior.

Back in the very first Avatar film, Sigourney Weaver’s character, Dr Grace Augustine, tragically died before the final battle. She was sort of reincarnated in the following film as Kiri te Suli Kìreysì’ite, biologically identical to Grace but raised by Jake and Neytiri. As we saw in both The Way of Water and the newly released Fire and Ash, Kiri has an impressively strong connection to Pandora’s god, Eywa, that allows her to do some pretty spectacular things.

A relationship between Kiri and Spider began brewing in The Way of Water. Spider, who is the son of the franchise’s big bad colonialist, Miles Quaritch, is a bit of an outcast amongst his adoptive Na’vi family, but his friendship/romance with Kiri was ultimately the bridge over such innate differences.

In Avatar: Fire and Ash, Spider and Kiri finally kiss, and while the moment felt a little forced, there has been lots of general backlash on Twitter.

“Kiri kissing spider was the worst scene in Avatar: Fire and Ash,” one person wrote.

The moment is even more awkward when you consider that Sigourney Weaver is 76 years old, and her co-star, Jack Champion, was “14 or 15” at the time it was filmed.

“Making Sigourney Weaver portray a teenager was already a very bad choice but making her kiss an actor in his 20s is an even worse one. just uncomfortable as hell,” one person wrote on Twitter.

Another said: “Ummmmm this is gross.”

Sigourney Weaver has now responded to the Kiri X Spider kiss

Put away your pitchforks, because Sigourney Weaver did not actually kiss Jack Champion when they were filming Avatar: Fire and Ash back in 2017.

“We had to be very delicate about that scene because it included a kiss,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “Obviously I wasn’t going to kiss Jack, who was 14 or 15, in real life.”

Instead, they employed some clever camera work and CGI to make the intimate moment happen. Apparently, director James Cameron “asked Jack to pick someone I could kiss and he did.”

https://x.com/avatarsequelsbr/status/2002110508439392540

“Then I imagine when I wasn’t there, they picked someone appropriate for Jack. That concern about all of that, which is quite legitimate, was going on,” she added.

Still, there’s genuine backlash about making Spider and Kiri an item in the first place. People felt their relationship in the second film was more sibling-like; after all, they both call the same people mum and dad.

Responding to that, James Cameron told PEOPLE: “There was a lot of controversy creatively for us around whether Spider and Kiri should stay kind of brotherly-sisterly. And I thought, no, let’s play that awkward young love thing where they don’t really know how to express it or confront it.

“And I just love that image when she kisses him at the waterfall and she’s a head taller than him and she has to kind of bend down. My memory of the seventh and eighth grade was all the girls were taller than me, and it didn’t slow me down at all! I thought they were very cool, even though they were bigger than me.”

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Featured image credit: Disney/Twitter and David Fisher/Shutterstock