Hollywood star admits Jurassic World Rebirth role was ‘unlike anything he’d done before’

Just seconds into this interview and someone’s already vocalising John Williams’ classic earworm of a theme for Jurassic Park.

‘That music still gives me chills because it’s so evocative of that first film and the feelings that I had when I saw it, which was sort of awe and wonder and spectacle and adventure all rolled into one,’ reminisces actor Rupert Friend, who’s part of the cast for new dino-stuffed adventure Jurassic World Rebirth.

For his co-star Mahershala Ali, his first impression of the eminently popular film series is also audio-based, remembering how you would hear dinosaurs ‘before you would see them’ and how it added to the impression of their size.

‘And just that feeling – I had never felt or heard that in a theatre before.’

While Jurassic World Rebirth might be the seventh film in the long-running franchise of over 30 years, it still provided unique opportunities to its actors.

‘With [my character] Duncan [Kincaid], I liked that he was active and decisive, and that the story required him to be, and so therefore it felt very different from anything that I have gotten to do up until this point,’ Ali, 51, shares.

This comes after a career that’s already encompassed two Oscar wins and films ranging from Moonlight and The Place Beyond the Pines to Alita: Battle Angel, Hidden Figures and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay.

‘But I also feel like the character had something that had happened to him or something that he had experienced that was very grounding – so there was something pulling him externally and something grounding him internally. That felt like a nice balance,’ he adds.

On Friend’s part, he was drawn to the ‘moral ambiguity’ of pharmaceutical rep Martin Krebs, who recruits covert opps expert Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) to help with a top-secret mission to retrieve samples from dinosaurs on their forbidden home island near the equator for a groundbreaking heart disease drug.

‘That you’re sort of ostensibly looking for a drug that will help people and save lives, but you’re also interested in making billions of dollars – a slightly conflicting thing!’

The mission also includes Jonathan Bailey’s conflicted palaeontologist Dr Henry Loomis and Ali’s Kincaid, the tough team leader.

Humanity’s hubris in Jurassic movies

We muse on the franchise’s classic lesson of foolish humans meddling and never seemingly learning from their mistakes, and humanity’s hubris.

‘That’s right on, the idea that we can just with impunity enter a landscape and an environment that we have no real place being,’ agrees Friend. ‘I think Jonathan’s character says something like, we’re going into their world, we’re entering their space, and to not respect that is always the beginning of the end. It’s the pride before a fall, the hubris.’

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I point out that Rupert also has an excellent line in Jurassic World Rebirth: ‘I’m too smart to die’.

That not everybody is going to be alive still by the end credits is one of the hallmarks of these films.

People are going to get picked off, and often in grisly and shocking fashion (let us not forget Jurassic Park’s Donald and his demise on a toilet at the claws – well, jaws – of a T-Rex).

In the newest film, returning screenwriter David Koepp, who penned both the 1993 original and 1997’s follow-up The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and director Gareth Edwards have certainly provided some gruesome and ‘fun’ new deaths – which brings it back to the franchise’s roots as a suspenseful horror-influenced film.

‘Seeing it, I was really satisfied with how propulsive the film felt,’ shares Ali. ‘Shooting something over the course of four months, and the way you have to do it – in bits and across multiple countries – it’s very hard to tell how the film was going to move. What the energy is that it’s going to carry? Because you’re just, in the most disciplined fashion possible, trying to make sure your moments connect from day to day, scene to scene.’

But he needn’t have worried.

‘I was relieved and so excited that it fit together the way it did to tell the type of story we were trying to tell.’

What Jurassic movies’ dinosaurs look like in 2025

It’s understandable that the cast wouldn’t be entirely across the final product given that, thanks to further advances in CG since ‘93, we’re now almost entirely beyond the era of practical dinosaurs like Stan Winston’s remarkable full-size T-Rex animatronic for Jurassic Park.

The first thought that Ali now has when someone mentions any of the films is ‘a stick and a tennis ball that you’re screaming at!’.

However, there was still one animatronic dinosaur they could interact with on set – fan favourite Dolores, the Aquilops.

‘I think it’s augmented by visual effects in the finished thing, but it was an incredible puppet with three – if not four – guys controlling the various things. And it would walk around and sit on people’s shoulders, and it could eat,’ recalls Friend.

‘And we would see renderings of things after we shot something from time to time of that and be like, “Oh, okay, that’s how big it is!”’ chimes in Ali. ‘But there wasn’t anything physical really to respond to other than a tennis ball and a stick.’

However, the actors still got to enjoy real-life locations as diverse as Thailand, Malta and the UK, at the insistence of filmmaker Edwards, who didn’t want to be overly reliant on green screens.

And the levels of practical, physical prep for that were quite astounding, Friend tells me when we catch up on the red carpet at the film’s world premiere in London’s Leicester Square.

‘In Thailand, they cleared a field and replanted it with a crop that we could then walk through after two months of that crop growing. There were levels of prep that were agricultural, not just cinematic, that I had never heard of before – how to make a rock face safe for abseiling down, how to make a waterfall for Johnny [Bailey] to jump into and come out of that wouldn’t kill him!’

And for those who were wondering, yes, self-confessed nerd Friend went back to watch the previous films before the shoot, having also been a fan of Michael Crichton’s original books growing up.

‘The evolution of it is fascinating. It’s a franchise that we’ve had with us for 30 years, and it’s really interesting to see how much love there still is for this world.’

Jurassic World Rebirth is in cinemas from today.

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