About a month after that, Johansson had Koepp’s script and was proposing her own touches for the character. “I just wanted to understand what the sta
About a month after that, Johansson had Koepp’s script and was proposing her own touches for the character. “I just wanted to understand what the stakes were for her, and that she wasn’t just driven by money or power. You wanted it to feel personal for her,” she says. “You have to love the characters and you want to root for them. The movie can’t just stand on the dinosaurs alone.”
Zora evolved to be less of a mercenary. “She’s someone who’s dedicated herself to saving other people, and I think she’s at a professional crossroads. I think she’s burnt out,” Johannson says. If all goes well, this can be the job that allows the character to retire from danger zones. “Of course everything goes wrong, but that’s the fun part,” she says.
As it charts a fresh course for the franchise, Jurassic World Rebirth also promises some other callbacks to the original Jurassic Park. Bailey hints that his paleontologist, Dr. Henry Loomis, has a history with Sam Neill’s intrepid character. “I’ve always wanted to make Dr. Alan Grant proud,” the actor says. “You’ll have to wait and see to see what sort of link there is between them.”
His professorial hero is a contrast to Bailey’s recent breakthrough role as Fiyero in Wicked, a less-than-intellectual character who scoffs at the library and kicks books aside in his signature song “Dancing Through Life.” Dr. Loomis would be aghast. Bailey says his Rebirth character “reinforces big, cerebral, and emotional arguments about the natural world and how we as humans live our lives.”
Unlike the others, he’s not combat-ready, however, which places him at extra risk on the Island of Misfit Dinosaurs. He may be a little too fascinated by them, and not guarded enough as he guides the team toward harvesting the dinosaurs’ genetic material. “His strengths are his compassion and enthusiasm and hunger for the natural world,” Bailey says. “That’s his brilliance and that’s also his downfall.”
Speaking of extracting DNA, the fresh film does this with Spielberg himself, who serves as an executive producer on Rebirth. “To me, it’s like a heist movie that meets all the films of Steven Spielberg I loved growing up,” Edwards says. “The three films we were orbiting were Jaws, Indiana Jones, and the awe and wonder of the original Jurassic.”
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