Kaylee Hottle Age, Death, Family, Biography

Some Lesser Known Facts About Kaylee Hottle

• Kayley Hottle was born in Atlanta, GA into an all deaf family.

• Her father was deaf and had four generations of deaf relatives.

• From childhood, she was accustomed to using American Sign Language and she was descended from Korea through her mother.

• Later, she attended the Texas School for the Deaf in Austin, Texas where she participated in the track and field team and played for the basketball team, the CTX Lady Knights.

• Hottle’s first experience in acting was in commercials.

• At the age of 9 in 2017, she was featured in a commercial for Convo, a video relay service.

• Around the same age, TMZ reports, she also starred in a PSA for the live video messaging app Glide, popular among many people who are deaf and hard of hearing.

• She continued to do other commercials and was involved in an informational campaign called 10 Deaf Children, One Powerful Message, which was to raise awareness for the Deaf community to support their cause for equal rights.

• Godzilla vs. Kong was a project that required casting director Sarah Halley Finn to look for a deaf actor, and she found herself contacting other casting directors and theatres for that purpose.

• Hottle had been spotted in the Convo commercial before, by an assistant director from Kong.

• This film turned out to be Hottle’s feature film debut.

• In it, Jia was portrayed as a deaf orphan raised by Dr Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), who lived on Skull Island, where she learned to communicate through sign language and formed an attraction to Kong.

• Hall and co. have been learning American Sign Language so that they can communicate directly with Hottle while not performing.

• Around this time, Hottle spoke about how some people viewed ASL and deafness as a barrier and for others it was a gift, but deaf was deaf and it was a language.

• The industry needed more deaf actresses and crew so that people may see that, she said, there is no reason for deaf people not to be able to do many things.

• Hottle returned to the characters she previously played in Godzilla x Kong, The New Empire (2024).

• She was nominated for Saturn Award for Best Performance by a Younger Actor for this role in the 52nd Saturn Awards.

• Hottle died early on 21 July 2026, at the age of 19.

• She was injured in one accident involving a single vehicle on a road in Frederick, Md., and was the third occupant in a 1995 Honda Accord that was driving when it turned off the road and crashed into a roadside ditch.

• The driver suffered non life threatening injuries. The other occupant of the car refused treatment.

• Police believed excessive speed to be a factor in the crash. Hottle was airlifted by the Maryland State Police to R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center where doctors pronounced her dead.

• Joshua Hottle, her father, was notified his daughter had been in a severe motor vehicle accident, and a few minutes later, police notified him that her heart had stopped on the journey to the hospital.

• Their whole family is deaf, so he used American Sign Language (ASL) to make his announcement of her death in a nearly 23 minute video statement on Facebook, and explained that he had to fly from Texas to claim her body.

• He named it “I am taking a flight that I never would like to take”.

• Hottle also was a student at the Texas School for the Deaf, and it was there that news of her death was also spread.