Jurassic World: Lost Kingdom actress Daniella Pineda sat down with the people with Build recently and revealed something previously unknown about her Zia Rodriguez character. A little something that she wishes had been included in the final cut but instead ended up on the editing floor. When working her way up to describing the scene, she said she “really, really loved” it but understood that lots of things have to be cut to get the end product to an appropriate length. It was a scene with her dinosaur vet character Zia and Chris Pratt’s character Owen in a military vehicle. Here’s how she described it.
“And I look at Chris and I’m like, ‘Yea. Square jaw. Good bone structure. Tall. Muscles. I don’t date men, but if I did, it would be you. It would gross me out, but I’d do it.”
Daniella loved not only the fact that Zia was saying it would gross her out to date one of the hottest guys around, but also that it gave some insight into the character. What a fun scene that would have been to watch.
Big-budget films like Beauty and the Beast, Power Rangers, and Star Trek Beyond have included LGBTQ characters more often in recent years, but mostly they don’t get lots of screen time. In fact, according to The Hollywood Reporter , the latest report from GLAAD indicates that only 12.8 percent of 2017 studio films included LGBTQ characters. That’s the lowest percentage since 2012 when the group started tracking these things.
Daniella Pineda ( @Maniella ) on the line of dialogue that was cut from #FallenKingdom that would have revealed her character Zia Rodriguez was a lesbian: “It was cool, because it was a little insight into my character” https://t.co/KUYnsw6PNz
— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) June 19, 2018
A couple of movies released this year have put LGBTQ characters front and center, namely Deadpool 2 that included a lesbian X-Men couple and Love, Simon which was a gay teen romance. While that’s a step in the right direction, there have been other projects that have chosen not to present characters who were LGBTQ in the source material in the same light on the screen. One example is the character Valkyrie in the movie Thor: Ragnarok . Tessa Thompson played Valkyrie onscreen and has noted that in the comics that are the source material for the movie, Valkyrie is bisexual. When it was adapted for the big screen though, a choice was made to not include the character’s bisexuality. Tessa says that despite that, she “was faithful to [Valkyrie’s bisexuality] in her depiction.”
You can catch Daniella Pineda and Chris Pratt in Jurassic World: Lost Kingdom, the fifth installment in the Jurassic Park series, when it hits theaters this Friday.
