When Jurassic Park hit theaters in 1993, it stunned film fans around the world. The realistic special effects and thrilling storyline had us all believing that maybe dinosaurs could roam the earth again. For at least one of the film’s stars, though, the success of Jurassic Park wasn’t quite as exciting as you might think. In fact, B.D. Wong admits that for years he felt some bitterness about how the film’s story played out for his character on screen.
In Jurassic Park, B.D. Wong played Dr. Henry Wu, one of the scientists involved in taking the ancient dino DNA and turning into the living, breathing creatures that inhabited the park. Despite his relatively minor role, and the sizable body count in that film, we never learned what happened to that character.
B.D. Wong told The A.V. Club that for many years, he didn’t have the best impression of the Jurassic Park series due to how his character’s role play out in the first film. Here it is in the actor's own words:
Yeah, you know, I’m a very lucky person. I did this bit part in the original Jurassic Park movie, and anybody who worked on that movie would probably have to be honest and tell you that they didn’t have any designs for that character at all. They didn’t care about him, they don’t even explain what happened to him at the end of the movie when everyone’s evacuating the island! Clearly, he was not a priority for anyone. And I was very bitter about that for many years. But my good friend Nathan once said to me, ‘Oh, well, you don’t have to worry about that, because that’s going to come back to you. You’ll see. They’ll come back to you.’ And I was, like, ‘I don’t see how that’s ever going to come back to me.’ I really could not see what he saw.
Wong’s friend was definitely onto something, and ultimately, Dr. Henry Wu did come back into the fold in Jurassic World, serving as a kind of a bridge between the original trilogy and the 21st century reboot. And it sounds like the veteran actor is quite pleased with how Wu is now being utilized:
But what he predicted was exactly what happened, which is that Colin Trevorrow and Steven Spielberg conspired and collaborated to reinvigorate the franchise from the park perspective, going back to the original book, and any sequels that would come from this are related to the original park or the original characters. There were two other sequels between Jurassic Park and the Jurassic World films, and you can count them as sequels, of course, but they’re not really related to the core energy of Jurassic Park. And Jurassic World and the films that followed were. And in their looking for loose ends, Colin Trevorrow remembered this character who played a huge part in the book, had a huge death in the book, and allowed him to be reinvestigated.
It is to the filmmakers’ credit that they found a compelling way to bring Dr. Wu back into the Jurassic narrative. Now, he has become a bit of a mainstay in the new Jurassic World series. In addition to appearing in Jurassic World, Wong would also co-star in the 2018 follow-up, Fallen Kingdom. And after nearly 30 years, his character will reunite with Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in Jurassic World: Dominion, which hits theaters in June 2022.
