12-Year-Old Jurassic World Rebirth Star Aurdina Miranda On Cuddling Up with Dolores the Aquilops
Miranda plays Isabella Delgado, the youngest member of a shipwrecked family who ends up making an unexpected friend.
**SPOILER WARNING!! The following interview contains minor spoilers for Jurassic World Rebirth!!**
A Jurassic movie just isn't a Jurassic movie without kids in mortal danger. Jurassic World Rebirth (now in theaters; get tickets here) dutifully carries on the hallowed tradition of fictional child endangerment by way of the Delgado sisters: 18-year-old Teresa (Luna Blaise) and 11-year-old Isabella (Audrina Miranda). The siblings find themselves shipwrecked on a dinosaur-filled island, the original R&D lab for John Hammond's InGen, alongside their father, Rueben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), and Teresa's somewhat lazy boyfriend, Xavier (David Iacono).
A relative newcomer to the Hollywood scene, Miranda, now 12, auditioned for Jurassic World Rebirth over a period of four months before landing the coveted role of Isabella. In all that time, however, she had no idea what the project she was trying out for until landing the job.
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"It really did feel unreal because a week later, we were already in London, starting to film," she tells NBC Insider over Zoom. "I didn't think I had time to fully [let it] set in until I was there in the moment. But it was a really amazing experience."
Jurassic World Rebirth's youngest cast member Audrina Miranda talks dinosaurs and Steven Spielberg
Miranda was first introduced to the blockbuster franchise (all the previous Jurassic films are currently streaming on Peacock) around the age of six, when her local theater showed the first three Jurassic Park movies back-to-back. "I still remember being scared," she says.
Rebirth director Gareth Edwards helped her tap back into that primal terror for scenes in which Isabella is nearly eaten alive by prehistoric predators. Before shooting the attack on Duncan's boat, for example, Edwards showed Miranda "a very terrifying clip" from Steven Spielberg's Jaws (also streaming on Peacock). "He said, ‘I want you to be just like that,'" she remembers. "[Gareth wanted to] get that heart-racing moment whenever I was on the boat and the Spinosaurus was trying to eat me."
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Channeling Spielberg's greatest hits seems more than apropos, given the fact that the celebrated director not only kicked off the Jurassic film series, but has served as an executive producer on all the sequels since Jurassic Park III. Miranda remembers briefly meeting the Hollywood legend over FaceTime during a particularly taxing night shoot in Thailand.
"All of us were tired and Frank Marshall, the producer, was talking to us. He was like, ‘Hold on one sec.’ Then he's like, ‘Oh, here,’ and it's Steven Spielberg on the phone. And we're like, ‘Oh, hi!’ I think everyone was just super excited, and it really gave us a second boost of energy."
Isabella is almost eaten again in another water-based set piece: the raft escape from a hungry T. rex. A previously-unadapted scene from Michael Crichton's original Jurassic Park novel, the thrilling rapids chase was filmed in one of the famous horizon tanks at Malta Film Studios.
"That was probably my favorite scene to shoot," Miranda reveals. "They made waves, and had a cardboard cut out of a T. rex head for me to look at. They were actually pushing on the raft gently, but still [forcefully enough] to make your heart beat and make you really act like you're scared of all of this."
For the third act encounter with the Distortus Rex, a disfigured abomination of genetic engineering gone awry, the cast had to rely on the old visual effects method of a tennis ball on a stick. "They did show us how the D-Rex was gonna look beforehand, so we could act as scared as possible," Miranda shares. "They were like, ‘Okay, it's here, and then it's going to go to one o'clock, two o'clock, three o’clock.' So I did have to learn my clocks for this."
Jurassic World Rebirth's Audrina Miranda on relationship between Isabella and Dolores the Aquilops
Thankfully, not all of Isabella's dinosaur encounters in the film are negative. Shortly after arriving on the island, the girl makes a new friend in the form of an Aquilops she names "Dolores." This pint-sized ancestor of Triceratops fits comfortably in a backpack and has a taste for red licorice, recalling the Reese's Pieces bond between Elliott and E.T.
"You just want to cuddle her," gushes the actress.
While Dolores is a fully CG creation in the final film (courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic), the production did make use of three 18-inch animatronic puppets on set. The version that most often interacted with the cast was dubbed "Dorothy" by the crew. "It took three remote controls," Miranda remembers. "One was for the head, for it to blink, for it to move its mouth. One was for the body, for it to move its legs. And then one was just for the tail. All of it just to make Dolores happen."
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These physical creations built by John Nolan's creature effects team later served as invaluable reference for the VFX artists led by David Vickery at ILM. "The animatronic looked just how it looks in the [finished] movie, which is amazing to see," adds Miranda, who also sounds off on Isabella making good on her word to bring Dolores home to the mainland: "Dolores is going to be that size forever. But I hope that me and Dolores have this bond that never ends. They're just cute little dinosaurs. They're plant-eaters and they love red licorice. I think they're just like a little dog."
Once production had wrapped, Miranda received a number of gifts from her A-list co-stars: a dinosaur necklace from Scarlett Johansson (Zora Bennett), a dinosaur plush from Mahershala Ali (Duncan Kincaid), and a music box that plays the Jurassic Park theme from Bechir Sylvain (LeClerc).
And despite the fact that her character is nearly swallowed whole on numerous occasions, Miranda is still a big fan of the very reason we love these films: the dinosaurs. "When they roar, it really shakes the seats and gets you shaken up," she concludes. "I just feel like it really does pay homage to the first Jurassic Park."
Jurassic World Rebirth is now playing in theaters everywhere. Click here for tickets! Need a refresher? the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World trilogies are now streaming on Peacock.
