As the grand finale to the epic trilogy of Jurassic World films, director Colin Treverrow wanted to do something special for Jurassic World Dominion – bring back the stars of the original Jurassic Park film.
It was a bold, ambitious plan, not least because he didn’t have the phone numbers for Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, or Sam Neill. With no way of contacting them, Trevorrow set about looking at different options.
“Our first plan was to build cyborg replicas of the actors,” he explained.
“The technology was there. Jim Cameron created it for the second terminator film where he built a cyborg based on Arnie Schwarzenegger. We actually built a prototype cyborg Laura Dern and it looked great in camera. Problem was there was always a concern that a bug in its programming could see it short-circuit and become a terrifying killing machine, rampaging across LA destroying all in its path.
“It’s happened before.”
Strangely it was the very film he was working on that provided inspiration for the solution.
“Jurassic World was about cloning. It was the obvious solution; we could clone these guys.”
The first step was to gather viable DNA, so Jurassic World scientists travelled to the sets of Marriage Story, Peaky Blinders and Thor: Ragnarök. Sure enough, in amber deposits left on the long-abandoned sets, they discovered DNA for the stars.
The next stage was six months of doing hard sums, and writing long complicated equations on blackboards. After a lot of hard work, finally, they had the formula for cloning human beings, and so they cloned Laura Dern, Sam Neill, and Jeff Goldblum.
“They weren’t 100% perfect,” continued Trevorrow.
“Clone Jeff Goldblum had a vestigial leg that we strapped up his back. Clone Sam Neill could only bark like a dog so we had to have someone dub his lines. Otherwise, they were great.”
With the clones of the original stars in place and a mediocre script ready to go. Trevorrow could set about making his film.
As for the clones, they now live on the Jurassic Park River Adventure at Universal Islands of Adventure where they are forced to work as little more than slaves because, technically, they’re not human, and are owned wholesale by Universal.
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