Five years ago this month, Michelle Yeoh was announced as a cast member of the Avatar sequelsYeoh's character, Dr. Karina Mogue, was not seen in Avatar: The Way of Water, but she was expected to make her debut in the upcoming sequel, Avatar: Fire and Ashes. However, director James Cameron has now clarified that Yeoh will not join the franchise until Avatar 4 in 2029.
“Michelle Yeoh is not going to be in the third movie. She’s going to be in movies 4 and 5,” Cameron told EW. “So that was a little bit misinterpreted. She’s coming in soon to play her part, which is an interesting and fun character. I mean, we’re moving a little bit too fast. This has been planned for years and years. The scripts were all written years ago, right up until the end of movie 5. So we’ve been working on parts of movie 4 as we’ve gone along, mainly because we have this young cast. We had to film them all while they were young.”
Cameron is referring here to the fact that Fire & Ash and the first act of Avatar 4 were already filmed in order to showcase the younger actors in the sequel before they age out. Avatar producer Jon Landau, who passed away last month, posted a photo of Yeoh on set in 2021.
Yeoh won the Oscar for Best Actress for her role in Everything Everywhere All At Once in 2022, and she has remained in high demand ever since. One of Yeoh’s upcoming projects is the TV movie Star Trek: Section 31 for Paramount+, in which she will reprise her role as Emperor Philippa Georgiou from Star Trek: Discovery. She will also star in the Prime Video series Blade Runner: 2099, which is set to release in 2025.