The actress plays Kayla Watts, an airplane pilot, in the sixth installment in the hit 'Jurassic Park' franchise.
How did you prepare to join a franchise that’s not only successful but established in the minds of audiences?
What is it like stepping into this action, adventure-oriented genre, given some of your previous roles? You’ve occupied very different worlds. How did you build the character, Kayla Watts, out?and I recognized that there was room in the action space for characters who had a little more depth of personhood, of lives, of personality — even if it doesn’t necessarily show up in the exposition on screen, you can still feel the difference.
Part of what I built out in Kayla was this notion of coming from a matriarchal line of women who served in the military — and then just thinking historically about when women were actually allowed to fly fighter jets in the military. I mean, that’s like early ’90s, very recent history. [ In terms of the dialogue, it felt like we didn’t get that much of Kayla’s backstory to me, or learn that much about her outside life. But she still felt like a full character to me.