Indigenous Actress Sues James Cameron for Using Her Face on Avatar Without Permission

The Indigenous actress Q’orianka Kilcher (Yellowstone) is suing James Cameron for exploiting her image. The Native Peruvian star claims the famed director told his team to base the design for the main character Neytiri (Zoë Saldaña) on her facial features after Cameron saw her in the 2006 Terrence Malick film The New World. “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,” the suit says, per NBC News.

The suit alleges that Cameron and his team based initial drawings and moldings, along with 3-D renderings, on Kilcher without compensation — or her knowledge at all. “The result was a hugely lucrative film franchise that presented itself as sympathetic to Indigenous struggles, all while silently exploiting a real Indigenous youth behind the scenes,” the suit says. Kilcher’s suit claims that, in 2010, Cameron gave her a sketch of Neytiri with the note, “Your beauty was my early inspiration for Neytiri. Too bad you were shooting another movie. Next time.” 

Cameron and his team have acknowledged that Kilcher was an inspiration for Neytiri in the past. “I remember he very much liked the face of a girl named Q’Orianka Kilcher, who starred in The New World, which was a Pocahontas movie with Colin Farrell,” sculptor and concept artist Jordu Schell told Gizmodo in 2009. “But, you know, I had pictures of Mary J. Blige and all these different people on the walls of really beautiful ethnic women.”

The suit alleges that Cameron and his team violated newly enacted anti-deepfake pornography laws in California because Kilcher was 14 in The New World and Neytiri has the Na’vi form of sex in the film. “[Cameron] took the unique biometric facial features of a 14-year-old Indigenous girl, ran them through an industrial production process, and generated billions of dollars in profit without ever once asking her permission,” Kilcher’s lead council, Arnold J. Peter, said in the release. “That is not filmmaking. That is theft.”