Jurassic World Dominion Star Sam Neill Had to Be Persuaded to Return

Jurassic World Dominion is hitting theatres next week and it will mark the first time since Jurassic Park was released in 1993 that  Laura Dern (Ellie Sattler), Sam Neill (Alan Grant), and Jeff Goldblum (Ian Malcolm) will all share the screen together. Recently, Neill was interviewed by Gizmodo and talked about everything from Jurassic Park fan theories to admitting he hasn’t seen the original movie that many times. The actor also revealed that it took some convincing to get him involved with the new movie, which is the first time he’s stepped into the role since Jurassic Park III was released in 2001. 

“Oh, no, I wasn’t automatically,” Neill explained. “I was getting rumors from my agent that Universal was talking about this, and they wanted me and Jeff and Laura to be in it, but I didn’t really want to be in something where I’d just be playing a cameo. That was not really interesting to me. But I went to Sitges to a film festival there and I met [co-writer and director] Colin Trevorrow there. He took me out to lunch. We had a long lunch, quite a lot of paella and a bottle or two of [indistinguishable] and yeah, and I was well persuaded by the end of that. So that was about October before we started shooting. We were supposed to start in February, I think. It ended up being more like May, June, of the next year, 2020. So it’s been quite a long time in gestation when you think about it.”

He added of Trevorrow, “Well, mostly his great and abiding affection for those characters and how he wanted them to be completely integrated into the Jurassic World world. And so that persuaded me. And also the idea of hanging out with Jeff and Laura again which, of course, is an attractive one in itself.”

Last year, Neill spoke to Collider and admitted he didn’t fully embody the character of Alan Grant until Jurassic Park III.

“For me, by the time I got to #3, probably a bit late in the day, I’d sort of worked out how to play that character, which I hadn’t really quite gotten around to in the first one,” Neill admitted. “I was still trying to work out, how do you play that guy in the hat? Something that comes completely naturally to someone like Harrison Ford. Not naturally to me. And something that Chris Pratt, fantastic guy, has given a lot of thought to and really worked out how to do it. And you have to think how to do that. It’s a special skill. You’re not just playing a character. You need a whole skillset. You need a whole armory to play an action hero and I wish I had known what those skills were when we did the first one, but there we are!”

Jurassic World: Dominion is set to be released in theaters on June 10th.