Grace Augustine: Who She Is, Who Plays Her and What Happens to Her

Grace Augustine is Dr. Grace Augustine, a human character on Pandora who is tied to the avatar program that Jake Sully joins in Avatar (2009), directed by James Cameron. The film is set in 2154, when the RDA mines unobtanium on Pandora, the home of the Na'vi, and the program lets humans control avatar bodies built in the Na'vi form. She is credited as Dr. Grace Augustine.

She is played by Sigourney Weaver, who is billed third in the 2009 cast, behind Sam Worthington as Jake Sully and Zoe Saldaña as Neytiri. Weaver then returns in a different role: she plays Kiri in Avatar: The Way of Water and Avatar: Fire and Ash, and Kiri is Grace's daughter. That link between the two characters is why Grace stays relevant long after her own story ends.

If you are new to the series, the Avatar movies in order page shows where each film sits, and the full list of Avatar characters places Grace beside the rest of the ensemble. For the wider cast, see the Avatar cast page.

Grace's closest ties in the films run to the people of the avatar program, to the antagonists who threaten it and, in the later films, to her daughter Kiri. In Avatar (2009) she is captured alongside Jake Sully after his confession, and she is freed together with him and with Norm Spellman, played by Joel David Moore, who is billed seventh.

Her opponents are on the RDA side. Parker Selfridge, played by Giovanni Ribisi, is the administrator who orders Hometree destroyed, and Quaritch, played by Stephen Lang, is the colonel who recruits Jake to gather intelligence on the clan. Both men also return in later films.

The most important relationship is with Kiri. In Avatar: Fire and Ash, Kiri introduces Spider to her mother, Grace, among the deceased Na'vi he meets through the underwater spirit trees. In The Way of Water, Kiri is the adopted daughter of Jake and Neytiri, a girl who bonds with the Metkayina Spirit Tree and has a seizure that scientists diagnose as epilepsy.

These are my picks, and they are opinion. In my opinion, the strongest Grace moment is her capture after Jake's confession, because it is where the film makes her share the consequences of his choices. It could be argued that it is also the scene that sets up the Hometree attack that follows.

Second, I would pick the escape with Trudy and Norm. It is a compact set piece, a rescue under fire in which the cost arrives almost in passing, and it prefigures the heavier losses of the sequels, such as Neteyam's death in The Way of Water.

Third is the Fire and Ash scene in which Kiri introduces Spider to Grace. It is brief, but it is the cleanest payoff the series has given a 2009 character, and it works because it asks the viewer to remember Grace without retelling her story. To feel it properly, watch the 2009 film first and the third film afterward, in the sequence the Avatar movies in order page lays out.