Indigenous actor sues James Cameron for ‘stealing’ her facial features for Avatar character

James Cameron and the Walt Disney Company are facing a lawsuit that claims the director based a key character in the Avatar franchise on a teenage actor without her permission.

The suit, filed by actor Q’orianka Kilcher, alleges that Cameron “extracted her facial features” and “directed his design team” to base the key Avatar character Neytiri on her appearance after seeing her in an LA Times advert for Terrence Malick’s 2005 film The New World. In the film Kilcher, who is Native Peruvian, played Pocahontas among a cast that also included Colin Farrell and Christian Bale.

A release about the lawsuit says that “one of Hollywood’s most powerful film-makers 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 describes the multibillion-dollar grossing Avatar series as a franchise that “presented itself as sympathetic to Indigenous struggles, all while silently exploiting a real Indigenous youth behind the scenes”. The character of Neytiri is played in the Avatar films by Zoe Saldaña.

The character of Neytiri in Avatar. Photograph: 20 Century Fox/Sportsphoto/Allstar

The release goes on to describe a meeting between Kilcher and Cameron in 2010, after the first film’s release. At an event, the director told the actor that he had a gift for her: a framed sketch of Neytiri that he had personally drawn and signed. Along with the sketch, Kilcher says that Cameron gave her a note that read, “Your beauty was my early inspiration for Neytiri. Too bad you were shooting another movie. Next time.”