LOS ANGELES — Indigenous actress Q’orianka Kilcher, who played Pocahontas in Terrence Malick’s 2005 film The New World, is suing filmmaker James Cameron for using her likeness as the basis for one of the lead characters in his hit film series Avatar.German-born US actress Q’orianka Kilcher, who is of indigenous Peruvian descent, alleges that in 2005 — when she was 14 — Cameron “extracted her facial features” from a photograph of her portraying Pocahontas in the film The New World.In court documents filed on Tuesday in California, her team claimed Cameron “directed his design team to use it as the foundation for the character of Neytiri”, depicted on screen by Zoe Saldaña.The lawsuit states that “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 lawsuit goes on to describe the Avatar series as a franchise that “presented itself as sympathetic to Indigenous struggles, all while silently exploiting a real Indigenous youth behind the scenes”.Kilcher claims she did not know she was the inspiration for Neytiri until she met Cameron at an event in 2010, the year after the release of the first Avatar movie.During the event, he reportedly told her he had a gift for her: a signed sketch of Neytiri by Cameron, along with a note that read: “Your beauty was my early inspiration for Neytiri. Too bad you were shooting another movie. Next time.”The suit claims that Kilcher was ultimately never offered a role.“When I received Cameron’s sketch, I believed it was a personal gesture, at most a loose inspiration tied to casting and my activism,” Kilcher said in a statement.“Millions of people opened their hearts to Avatar because they believed in its message and I was one of them. I never imagined that someone I trusted would systematically use my face as part of an elaborate design process and integrate it into a production pipeline without my knowledge or consent. That crosses a major line. This act is deeply wrong.”Kilcher is seeking compensatory and punitive damages, disgorgement of profits attributable to the use of Kilcher’s likeness, injunctive relief, and corrective public disclosure.The actress is also known for her human rights and environmental activism, and has been a keynote speaker for Amnesty International, the International Forum on Globalization and the United Nations panel discussions titled “Indigenous Peoples: Human Rights, Dignity and Development with Identity”.Kilcher’s other TV and film roles include Hostiles (2017), Color Out of Space (2020), the hit neo-Western series Yellowstone, and The Life of Chuck (2024). She is also rumoured to be starring in the upcoming historical drama As Deep As The Grave, which has hit headlines for including a fully AI-generated version of late actor Val Kilmer.
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