Yellowstone actress Q’orianka Kilcher has filed a lawsuit against James Cameron and The Walt Disney Company for alleged unauthorized use of her likeness without her consent.
In the suit, that was filed on Tuesday and reviewed by The Hollywood Reporter, Kilcher alleges that the Avatar director extracted her facial features after seeing her performance in Terrence Malick’s 2005 film The New World, which she acted in when she was 14, and directed his design team to use it as the basis for the character of Neytiri.
The complaint specifically cites an April 24 YouTube video of Cameron discussing his Tech Noir museum exhibit in Paris, where he recounted the making of Avatar. In the clip, he explains the design inspiration behind Neytiri and recalls noticing Kilcher’s appearance in New World and how her face went on to mold the character.
“This is actually her lower face,” he said in the video, as he also recounted a story that Kilcher cites in her suit of Cameron giving her a gift when telling her she was the inspiration for Zoe Saldaña’s onscreen role of Neytiri years prior.
Kilcher alleges that she met Cameron in person for the first time in March 2010 at an environmental charity event, shortly after the 2009 release of the first Avatar film. At the event, the director told the actress he admired her activism work and said he had “something for you.” The filing claims Cameron invited her to his office for her to receive a “surprise gift.”
Kilcher and her mother later went to Cameron’s office, and while he was not present at the meeting, his assistant gave her a sketch of Neytiri that was drawn and signed by the Titanic director. It also came with a handwritten letter, which read, “Your beauty was my early inspiration for Neytiri. Too bad you were shooting another movie. Next time.”
“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 complaint reads. “Plaintiff Q’orianka Kilcher, a Native Peruvian actress and activist, was only 14 years old when director James Cameron extracted, replicated, and commercially deployed her facial likeness as functional biometric source data in Avatar‘s character design pipeline, without her knowledge or consent. This action does not seek to restrict or punish speech or artistic expression; it seeks to remedy the unlawful taking of Plaintiff’s property: her own face, used as a commercial production asset to generate billions of dollars in profit.”
The actress is seeking compensatory and punitive damages, disgorgement of profits attributable to the use of her likeness, injunctive relief and corrective public disclosure.
THR has reached out to Cameron and Disney for comment, but did not hear back by the time of publication.