Most actors jump at the chance to star in a sequel to the highest-grossing movie ever. Michelle Rodriguez is not like most actors. The Fast & Furious star revealed to Vanity Fair that she told James Cameron that the Avatar character couldn’t be resurrected from the dead. A fourth time would be “overkill,” Rodriguez said the Blockbuster filmmakers.
Rodriguez debuted in Cameron’s 2009 original Avatar, playing Trudy Chacon, a fighter pilot who works for the Avatar program and sympathizes with Na’vi. Trudy sacrifices her life in battle to ensure Na’vi victory over the criminal humans seeking to control Pandora.
Variety writes about Rodriguez’s reaction to Cameron’s idea. “Dude, when I saw Jim [Cameron] recently, he was like, ‘I was thinking, “What if Michelle came back? A lot of the other characters came back [in The Way of Water].”‘ I was like, ‘You can’t do that—I died as a martyr.’”
Rodriguez continued listing all the times her dead characters have been brought back. “I came back in ‘Resident Evil,’ I wasn’t supposed to. I came back in ‘Machete,’ I wasn’t supposed to. I came back with ‘Letty,’ I wasn’t supposed to. We can’t do a fourth [time], that would be overkill!”
To reject Avatar is to leave one of the greatest franchises in cinematic history. Even without adjusting for inflation, the original Avatar is still the highest-grossing film in the world; in total, it has grossed $2.9 billion. The sequel Avatar: The Way of Water came out 13 years after the release of the original and broke box office records, making it the third highest-grossing film of all time.
Rodriguez stars in the new Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and Fast X.
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