Set five-years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion (stream it on Peacock), Jurassic World Rebirth ushers in the next chapter of the franchise with a brand-new cast of characters.
The ensemble is essentially split into two factions: the ParkerGenix funded merc team that includes Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), extraction expert Duncain Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) and paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey). There’s also the shipwrecked Delgado family, including Rueben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his daughters Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Bella (Audrina Miranda), and Teresa’s boyfriend, Xavier (David Iacono).
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Each and every one of them are put in the line of dino fire at some point during Jurassic World Rebirth but they all escape Ile Saint-Hubert with their lives. Not exactly a small feat in the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World franchise. However, director Gareth Edwards recently shared with NBC Insider that one of those characters was set to die by the end of the film! We get him to reveal who it is, and how they were saved to, perhaps, dance with the dinosaurs once more.
Why Gareth Edwards saved this Jurassic World Rebirth character
In the first cut of the film, Edwards confirmed that Mahershala Ali’s Duncan Kincaid was going to sacrifice his life to save Zora, Henry and the Delgado family from the Distortus rex.
“What happened there was retrospectively kind of great, but it was not the plan,” Edwards said providing context. “Basically, the big choice was does he live or does he die? We knew we wanted to get to the end of the movie and not have everybody live all nicely and easily. Mahershala, when he read the script, he was like, ‘I think he should die.’ And I thought he should die, and I wanted to do that, so I jumped on that and went, ‘I agree. Let’s go!’”
Edwards said screenwriter David Koepp wrote the sequence to end with Kincaid’s death, and they executed it according to the page. “For the first cut of the movie, he died and that’s the version I showed to this studio,” he said.
And then the studio executives asked him to shoot a version of that scene where Kincaid lives, just in case.
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“I’m sitting there going, ‘No, I know how this works. We shoot one and we’ll get forced to use it,’” Edwards said of his immediate reaction. But then the pragmatic side of him knew that he would have to shoot a version where he lives, so he proceeded to mull the classiest version of that moment.
“I started trying to imagine that and then I started to really like it,” he said of his unexpected change of heart. “And then I was like, ‘Let’s shoot it, and I have to shoot it as well as I would the version where he died because this might be the movie. Everyone went for it and put all their all into it.”
When he put that alternate cut together, Edwards said what dawned on him was that savvy film audiences have a tendency to subconsciously know if a character’s going to die in the next moment because of the way it’s built up. “I think because we’d written it that he was about to die, every little signal subconsciously told the audience that’s what’s going to happen and so you really think that’s going to happen. And then when it it doesn’t, it’s a genuine surprise because we do all the tropes [implying] he was going to die, like says his last words to Scarlett and and there’s the music, so you go, ‘This is his death scene.’”
Except, it wasn’t. Kincaid makes it out with the rest of his surviving crew and it’s genuinely a relief to see him on the escape boat.
Edwards said he was worried the audience was going to feel it was a cop out, but his first public screening set him straight. “The cheer it got, the genuine reaction it got in the cinema the other night, it was the only part of the whole night where I got a bit tearful,” he shared. “Then I was like, ‘Thank God, we did that!’ It was the right choice.”
Jurassic World Rebirth is in theaters everywhere. Get tickets now!
