“Godzilla vs. Kong” star Kaylee Hottle died after a tragic car crash in Maryland earlier this week, according to a report. She was 18 years old.
The actress’ father, Joshua Hottle, confirmed the sad news to TMZ on Wednesday. He also shared a 20-minute livestream on Facebook, communicating with followers in ASL as his daughter also deaf. He said he was in Texas when he learned of the collision, and that he received a follow-up call informing him Kaylee’s heart had stopped on the way to the hospital.
“I am taking a flight that I never would like to take,” he captioned the video, referring to the journey he had to take to claim his daughter’s body.
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Kaylee comes from an all-deaf family, spanning four generations of deaf relatives on her father’s side, according to her IMDb bio. She started acting at a young age, nabbing roles in commercials for the live video messaging app Glide — often used by many members of the deaf and hard-of-hearing community — and for the video relay service app Convo. She told Chron magazine in a 2024 interview that the latter ad caught the eye of a casting director Sarah Halley Finn, who went on to recruit her for her role as Jia in “Godzilla vs. Kong.”
“I had a connection with Convo. They asked me to be in a commercial one day, and so I did that commercial,” she told Chron through an interpreter. “And then the assistant director of [Kong: Skull Island] saw me and they thought I matched the character description of Jia.”
In the 2021 movie, Kaylee’s character, a native of Skull Island, communicated with Kong through sign language. She also appeared in the 2024 sequel, “Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire.”