Deaf Godzilla Star Kaylee Hottle Dies at 18

Hottle was born in Atlanta to a family that had been deaf for generations, and American Sign Language (ASL) was her first language. That fluency launched her screen career: as a child she was cast as Jia, a young girl who signs with the giant ape in Godzilla vs. Kong, released in 2021, and its 2024 sequel, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. In a 2021 interview with the deaf news outlet The Daily Moth, she described how hard it was to turn a spoken script into ASL, saying film-makers sometimes wanted her to stick to written lines without recognising that ASL builds meaning differently. Her parents helped with the translation, and she taught castmates who had never met a deaf person to sign. Her co-star Alexander Skarsgard learned ASL so that the two could talk off camera and told one interviewer that she "steals the movie".

Her death was confirmed by her father, Joshua Hottle, who is also deaf and told his Facebook followers in a livestream that he was about to fly from Texas to collect his daughter's body, the entertainment outlet TMZ reported. Hottle had also appeared in an episode of the series Magnum P.I. and in commercials for products that help deaf and hard-of-hearing people, and she competed for her school's track and field team. The Texas School for the Deaf, where she was in her final year, said it was sharing the news "with profound sadness" and asked the public not to speculate about the accident. It said the loss would deeply affect its community, and counselling is being offered to students and staff.