Five years ago this month, Michelle Yeoh was announced as a cast member in the Avatar sequels. Yeoh’s character, Dr. Karina Mogue, sat out of Avatar: The Way of Water, but she was expected to debut in the upcoming sequel, Avatar: Fire & Ash. However, director James Cameron has now clarified that Yeoh won’t be joining the franchise until Avatar 4 in 2029.
“Michelle Yeoh won’t be in 3. She’s in 4 and 5,” Cameron told EW. “So that got a little bit misreported. She will be coming in soon to do her part, which is an interesting, fun character. I mean, we’re getting ahead of ourselves now. This whole thing has been planned for years and years. The scripts were all written years ago, through the end of movie 5. So we’ve been working on parts of 4 even as we go along, mostly because we’ve got this young cast. We had to shoot them all while they were still young.”
Cameron is referring to the fact that Fire & Ash and the first act of Avatar 4 have already been filmed in order to feature the sequel’s young performers before they age out of the roles. Avatar producer Jon Landau, who passed away last month, posted a picture of Yeoh on set in 2021.
Yeoh won the Oscar for Best Actress for her role in 2022’s Everything Everywhere All At Once, and she’s remained heavily in-demand ever since. One of Yeoh’s upcoming projects is the Star Trek: Section 31 TV movie for Paramount+, where she will reprise her role as Emperor Philippa Georgiou from Star Trek: Discovery. She will also star in Prime Video’s Blade Runner: 2099 series, which is expected to debut in 2025.