Zoe Saldaña Goes Deep into Grief and Sings Again, Delivering One of the Most Emotional Moments in 'Avatar: Fire and Ashes'- INTERVIEW

MIAMI - Latina Oscar winner Zoe Saldaña's return as Neytiri in Avatar: Fire and Ashes, the highly anticipated third chapter of James Cameron's sci-fi saga, pushes the character into her most intimate and painful emotional territory yet. One of the film's most striking moments comes when Neytiri sings the SongCord, a mourning song, while holding a beaded necklace, a scene Cameron has described as central to the spiritual arc of the story.

For Saldaña, the moment was not conceived as a performance but as an act of remembrance, rooted in grief, ritual, and the physicality that defines Neytiri as a character.

Saldaña traveled to Miami to premiere the movie. In a red carpet interview with The Latin Times and ENSTARZ, she admitted she was "extremely nervous" when Cameron approached her with the idea. The song, written by composer Simon Franglen, was already written in the soundtrack.

"Jim approached me and said, 'I want you to sing,'" she recalled, explaining that at the time she was dealing with vocal cord issues and noticed that "the placement of my voice dropped a great deal." Rather than seeing that change as an obstacle, Saldaña connected it to Neytiri's internal state. "I think it was because I was channeling a form of grief," she said, adding that Neytiri is "a creature that experiences life through her body and her heart and her instincts, not necessarily her mind first." Even her voice, she explained, reflected that emotional shift.

To find her way into the song, Saldaña drew from a deeply personal childhood memory. She recalled watching her grandmother wake up at 4:30 in the morning to pray the rosary, bead by bead, each repetition functioning like a chant. "It always felt like a chant," Saldaña said. "I thought, well, I am familiar with some type of chanting when you really want to sort of enter into a zone of remembrance."

That memory became the emotional blueprint for the scene. The beaded necklace Neytiri touches mirrors a rosary, and the melody itself is known in the film as the "song cord," a sacred object that binds memory, loss, and continuity.

That connection to ritual and loss is deeply personal for Saldaña, whose life was marked early by grief. When she was nine years old, her father died in a car accident, a loss that reshaped her childhood overnight. Shortly afterward, her mother made the decision to move Zoe and her sisters to the Dominican Republic, where they were raised by extended family.

In Avatar: Fire and Ashes, Neytiri is grappling with the aftermath of devastating losses introduced in Avatar: The Way of Water, including the death of her son Neteyam. As a mother of three sons, the experience was particularly poignant for her.

This third film leans more heavily into themes of mourning, rage, and moral complexity, particularly for Neytiri, whose grief begins to reshape her worldview. The song is not meant to comfort the audience but to immerse them in a raw, ceremonial expression of pain, aligning with the Na'vi's spiritual relationship to memory and ancestors.

That instinctive, body-first approach to singing echoes Saldaña's acclaimed performance in Emilia Pérez, where her voice again became a vehicle for transformation rather than spectacle. That role ultimately earned her an Academy Award, solidifying her evolution from blockbuster icon to actor celebrated for emotional risk and vulnerability. With Avatar: Fire and Ashes set for release in 2025, Saldaña's Neytiri appears poised to deliver one of the saga's most haunting chapters yet, one where song, grief and survival are inseparable.

Originally published on Latin Times