Edie Falco apparently displeased James Cameron with her joke about Avatar 2 flopping

Edie Falco recently said she has no idea what’s going on with the Nurse Jackie revival in development, because “they give me a script and I do my job. What goes on before then, I completely don’t understand, and that’s what’s going on right now.” (Falco is an executive producer in addition to starring in the series.) If you had any doubt that Falco does indeed not know what’s going on with her projects beyond when she’s actually on set acting in them, look no further than Avatar: The Way Of Water, which she admitted on The View in 2022 she assumed had come out and flopped because she stopped paying attention after she shot it. 

Even at the time, Falco knew it was a risky thing to admit—”I will never work again because I said that,” she told The View panel in 2022—but it turns out expressing her ignorance did in fact have consequences. “I heard straight from the source who was with him when he heard that I had said that, that it did not go well,” she now says of Avatar mastermind James Cameron, speaking on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show With Julia Cunningham (via Entertainment Weekly). “I took a lot of flack for that.”

Falco didn’t mean for her comment on The View to be an insult to Avatar: The Way Of Water. She was trying to explain that “I never know what’s going on with my life” and poke fun at herself for not keeping up with a movie she made, a movie that happens to be one of the most financially successful of all time. The point of telling the story was to emphasize that “I am a dolt,” she jokes, but it didn’t land with Cameron and the studio: “I got a lot of phone calls from a lot of very important people.”

“I make these things, I do the job, I say goodbye to everybody, and then I’m done,” she reiterates. “Then I’m onto the next thing. I have no idea what happens to things after I’m done.” She’s passionate about acting, but “The part of watching, it has nothing to do with me.” She adds, “Things can come out or they don’t. They do well or they disappear. They go straight to video or nobody finishes. I have no idea ’cause it often doesn’t affect my life in any way. My part of what I do is done.” Falco will be seen again as General Ardmore in Avatar: Fire And Ash.