#vanity fair JWR interview

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As it charts a new 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 new 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.”

Bailey’s character channels Dr. Jones in one sequence set on a towering cliff, when he tries to extract fluid from the eggs of some flying dinosaurs who are said to be the size of fighter jets. The egg is about the same size as the golden idol from the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark (which was the first of many movies Marshall made with Spielberg.) “The original script just referenced the nest in a cliff and I really felt like we’re in Central America, and I like the idea that there was an old civilization here at one point,” Edwards said. Instead of a cave, he made the setting “an Inca-style old temple that had been abandoned hundreds of thousands of years ago. Inevitably, the second you do that, you’re suddenly going, ‘This is very Indiana Jones.’”

Bailey points out that the relationship between the three leads mirrors another monstrous Spielberg classic about a killer shark. “Much like in Jaws, you see how three people react to the same extreme level of survival,” he says. His Dr. Loomis is like Richard Dreyfuss’s bookish oceanographer; Johansson is the battle-hardened leader like Roy Scheider’s police chief, Martin Brody; and Ali’s Duncan Kincaid, a black-ops logistics expert who shepherds them into the island, has elements of Robert Shaw’s grizzled seafarer Quint.

New image of Jonathan Bailey as Dr. Henry Loomis and him talking about his character in Jurassic World Rebirt [x]