According to actress Daniella Pineda, like “Black Panther” and “Thor: Ragnarok,” the soon-to-be-released sequel to “Jurassic World” once included an openly lesbian moment, but it got left on the cutting room floor.
In a comment in a Build interview highlighted by The Hollywood Reporter, Pineda said her character in the film, paleoveterinarian Zia Rodriguez, was written as a lesbian, a detail that came out in one line that was filmed but ultimately cut from the final edit.
“It’s me and Chris Pratt and we are in a military vehicle with all of these mercenaries,” she told the outlet. “I look at Chris and am like, ‘Yeah. Square jaw. Good bone structure. Tall. Muscles. I don’t date men, but if I did, it would be you. It would gross me out, but I would do it.'”
Though she said she “understood why they cut it,” citing the “sake of time,” she suggested that removing it ended up blocking that key “insight” into her character. “It was cool, because it was a little insight into my character,” she said.
Similar omissions were reported after the releases of Marvel’s “Thor: Ragnarok” and “Black Panther.” The Daily Wire’s Paul Bois reports:
“Black Panther” producer and Marvel executive Nate Moore said of the [deleted “lesbian flirtation” scene]: “The Ayo/Okoye flirtation was something Florence improvised on the day because she was also a fan of the books and brought that to set, and we thought it was a fun moment. Again, that becomes one of those things in a world where you could have a four-hour cut that would be fun to sort of have in there, but as we started to pare down the film and make it as streamlined as possible, it was unfortunately something that went away.”
He said that it is “an idea again that I think we can revisit in future films” and that it “is something that will definitely happen sooner rather than later.”
The hit movie “Thor: Ragnarok” also had a deleted LGBTQ scene in which the character Valkyrie (played by Tessa Thompson) is shown to be bisexual when a female lover leaves her bedroom. Thompson said the film’s director Taika Waititi wanted to keep the scene, but was forced to cut it.
THR notes that GLAAD has been sounding the alarm over what it says is the underrepresentation of LGBTQ people in Hollywood productions, with 12.8% of studio films including LGBTQ characters, “the lowest percentage since the organization began keeping tabs in 2012.”
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