Daniel Day-Lewis is in my opinion, the greatest actor currently walking around on this blue-green space marble we call Earth. There simply isn’t a role he can’t play, a claim that will definitely be put to the test in his next acting gig.
He’s always been known as one of the greatest scenery chewers to ever grace the screen, and now it seems like he’ll be taking that to very literal lengths to play a dinosaur in Jurassic Park 4. Yes, a dinosaur.
This was supposed to be one of those cool movie Easter Egg things that only gets found out after the production has wrapped, but unfortunately it seems that the JP4 production has a couple leaks. Although the production is still in its fledgling stages, with director Collin Treverrow only being announced a short while back, there’s already quite a bit of brainstorming going on around how the dinosaurs will be done, now that we’ve advanced quite a bit in FX technology since the last film. The original films made use of some groundbreaking CGI work for their thunder lizards, but a huge portion of the scenes, where the human actors had to physically interact with the dinos in close up, famously had people in special animatronic dino suits created by Stan Winston Studios. And apparently, Mr Day-Lewis is going to be one of those people.
The story was initially leaked to Bleeding Cool through a source of theirs and as luck would have it, they managed to get some interview time with Steven Spielberg, who directed two of the original trilogy of films and will be producing the new one. They pressed him to confirm the story and although initially reluctant, he eventually spilled the beans, saying that the “casting” came about as a joke on the set of Spielberg’s Lincoln, in which Day-Lewis starred and for which he took home the Oscar for Best Lead Actor this year.
“What you need to understand – well, the thing with Daniel is that people think that he’s such an intense guy, and he is, he really is, but he’s actually also, well Daniel’s a lot of fun. You saw some of that on Oscar night with his acceptance speech. He can be a joker. And during Lincoln, after one of these intense scenes, after he’s just nailed it like he always does – just perfection every time – I ask him, rhetorically, ‘Is there nothing you can’t do?’ and he replies, deadpan, ‘Yes. I can’t play a dinosaur” and somebody, I think it was Joe [Joseph Gordon-Levitt], immediately shouts out “Challenge accepted!”.
When I mentioned this moment to Colin [Treverrow] last week, as just a sort of funny anecdote, he got the gleam in his eye, like a naughty kid, and he asks ‘Can we do it? Can we make Daniel a dinosaur?’ so I said that technically, yes we could, but it would be up to Daniel, who you know is extremely picky about roles. Took me years to get him to do Lincoln.
Luckily, all it took this time was one phone call, as Daniel was totally in on the joke, saying that if some Englishman [Benedict Cumberbatch] could play a dragon [in The Hobbit trilogy] then he could play a dinosaur!”
As to which dinosaur Day-Lewis would play, well Spielberg was a bit reluctant to reveal that info, as generally revealing which dinos would take center stage in a Jurassic Park film is sort of a big deal. But the veteran director did drop one big clue though.
“Which dinosaur? Well I can’t – you know how it is, you have to keep back some secrets. I’ve already said too much. I will say this though, for somebody of Daneil’s caliber, there are very few dinosaurs, very few that could match up to him in reputation. I can think of one though.”
Daniel Day-Lewis as the T-Rex? Oh sweet Xenu, say it’s so! Now clearly, since dinosaurs can’t talk, at least not unless a healthy dose of recreational pharmaceuticals are involved on your end, this certainly will not be on the level of Benedict Cumberbatch’s motion captured portrayal of Smaug, I’m guessing he’ll simply be operating the animatronics and manipulating the dino from inside the costume. But still, how cool is that?
Last Updated: April 1, 2013
