Since it was first announced that the dinosaurs would be expanding from Jurassic Park to Jurassic World, fans have wondered whether they would still have time for original series stars like Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum, and Laura Dern, or—as with so many friends who have moved—whether the dinos would extend them vague invitations to come visit some time, only to conveniently “miss” their phone calls whenever they come into town. (“Oh, I must have been eating goats!”) But now director Colin Trevorrow has definitively confirmed that, no, none of the above will appear in the sequel, telling IGN, “I respect those actors too much to shoehorn them into this story for my own sentimental reasons. Jurassic Park isn’t about the bad luck of three people who keep getting thrown into the same situation.”
Instead, it’s about the bad luck of all-new people, including Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, who get thrown into that same situation—though Trevorrow said you will see one familiar face that hasn’t been eaten already. BD Wong will return to play Dr. Henry Wu, about whom Trevorrow says, “He had a much larger role in the original novel, he was the engineer of this breakthrough in de-extinction. He spent two decades living in Hammond’s shadow, underappreciated. We think there’s more to his story.” Wu was overshadowed in the film as well, appearing only once, early on, in the “life finds a way” lab sequence, with the other characters giving him and his fate nary a thought after the park breaks down. But now Wu will be back, creeping everyone out with his thoughts on “unauthorized breeding,” this time on a much larger scale.