Actress Daniella Pineda has claimed that a line revealing her character to be gay was cut out of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom owing to shortage of time, Yahoo reported. Directed by JA Bayona, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom narrates the adventures of Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) as they try to rescue dinosaurs on the fictional island of Isla Nublar before it is destroyed by a volcanic eruption. The film was released in India on June 8 and will be released in the United States on Friday.
Pineda plays Zia Rodriguez, a dinosaur veterinarian who is part of the Dinosaur Protection Group formed by Claire Dearing. In a Yahoo Entertainment-moderated conversation at Build Series Studio, Pinneda said that Zia had made a remark to Owen early on in the film that revealed her sexuality.
“I look at Chris and I’m like: ‘Yeah, square jaw, good bone structure, tall, muscles,’” she said about the scene. “‘I don’t date men, but if I did, it would be you. It would gross me out, but I’d do it.’”
Pineda said she understood that the scene was cut “for the sake of time”, as it wasn’t germane to the story. The final film has a 130-minute run time. “I love that I’m looking at Chris Pratt, the hottest guy in the world, and I’m like, ‘It would gross me out, but I guess I would do it!’ It was also cool because it was a little insight into my character. But they cut it,” she said.
The scene was conceived by Bayona and co-writer Colin Trevorrow, who also reportedly made the decision to cut it out.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is the fifth film in the Jurassic Park franchise that began with Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic. It is the second installment in the rebooted trilogy after Trevorrow’s Jurassic World (2015).
The Guardian and Yahoo pointed out that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is not the first Hollywood film to remove a gay reference from its final cut. Last year, Tessa Thompson said that a scene confirming her character as bisexual was removed from Thor: Ragnarok (2017). A shot of a woman exiting Thompson’s character’s bedroom was removed because it reportedly “distracted from the scene’s vital exposition”. In 2016, actor John Cho claimed that a “welcome-home kiss” between two male characters was cut from Star Trek Beyond (2016).
The Guardian also mentioned a May report by the media monitoring group Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation or Glaad, which found that only a 12.8% of major Hollywood productions in 2017 had characters who were lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer. Glaad wants 20% of studio films to include LGBTQ characters by 2021 and 50% of by 2024.
