The Jurassic Park Cast, Then & Now

It’s been almost three decades since Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park first debuted. The film became an international phenomenon, and the London premiere was even attended by Princess Diana.

Some of Jurassic Park’s original cast members — notably Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern, and Sam Neill — returned for Jurassic World: Dominion, which came out earlier this month. In honor of its release, here’s a look at OG cast in 1993 and 2022.

Sam Neill (right) starred as curmudgeon-y paleontologist Alan Grant in the first Jurassic Park movie.

Neill, who wasn’t able to attend the Dominion premiere, told The New York Times that his character suffers “a slight case of arrested development” in the new movie. “He’s older and grumpier, but he just wants to do what he’s always done, which is dig bones,” Neill said.

In Jurassic Park, a then-23-year-old Laura Dern played Dr. Ellie Sattler, a young paleobotanist invited to the theme park.

Dern told the NYT that it was important for her character to have grown since the original trilogy, and that Dr. Sattler “would have naturally evolved into dealing with the climate crisis in her awareness of paleobotany and soil science and DNA” by the events of Dominion.

In 1993, Jeff Goldblum played Dr. Ian Malcolm, a suave mathematician who went with Alan and Ellie to the park. Goldblum still remembers the film’s initial rollout, telling the NYT: I’m not focused on the commerce of it all ... but I do remember that opening weekend was exciting.”

Dr. Malcolm remains one of the actor’s most cherished roles. “Over the decades, [Jurassic Park] changed my life considerably,” Goldblum told the NYT. “I’m a different person than I ever would’ve been for having worked on that first movie ... I’m much, much enhanced.”

BD Wong memorably starred in Jurassic Park as Dr. Henry Wu, the theme park’s chief geneticist and biotechnologist.

Wong, now 61, called his OG cast mates “iconic” at the film’s Hollywood premiere earlier this month. “[P]eople like to use that word a lot, ‘iconic’ — but they’re really icons. They have this way of carrying themselves that’s really unique,” Wong told Variety.