James Cameron Accused of Stealing 14-Year-Old Girl’s Face for Main Character of Billion-Dollar “Avatar” Films
Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech 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,” …
