Turns Out Jeff Goldblum Was Nearly Written Out Of The OG ‘Jurassic Park’

Hard is at may be to picture the film without him, it turns out life almost didn’t find a way in the original Jurassic Park, with extreme jazz Daddy/man for whom the printed shirts revival was practically invented Jeff Goldblum revealing that he was very nearly written out of the 1993 blockbuster entirely.

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The impending home release of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is bringing with it the plethora of bonus things and extra titbits you’ve come to expect from such a thing. And chief among them this time around is a fairly illuminating cast roundtable being called Fallen Kingdom: The Conversation.

Whilst that video doesn’t expand on the topic of scientists being so preoccupied with whether or not they could and if it would’ve been better if they’d stopped to think if they should, it does give us an insight into Goldblum’s career circa-1993, before the hair went grey and the pants got alluringly tighter.

As the yarn goes, Stephen Spielberg came to Goldblum directly and explained they were teetering on the edge of writing out the character of Dr Ian Malcolm entirely; instead, they’d mash the better lines Malcolm had in the script into Sam Neill‘s character of Dr Alan Grant instead. Because that guy was clearly the fountain from which all dinosaur-related humour should spew forth.

When I first met Steven Spielberg at Amblin, he came in and said, ‘You know, there’s a movement afoot, a new rewrite is happening, and your character, Ian Malcolm, is being written out. We probably wanna give these funny lines and kinda incorporate your character into the Sam Neil character.’

Imagine that. A world without Ian Malcolm. No chaos theory. No “life finds a way.” No shirt-open scenes while nursing a horrendously broken leg. No incredibly mangled sexy laugh.

None of it. Gone. All gone. Never to exist.

Fortunately though we live on the right and good timeline and therefore Goldblum did wind up in the film (albeit immobile and unimportant from when the Rex rips his leg in two onwards, so you sorta get where this is all coming from). And the rest, as we all know, is history.

The good dinos blessed us with Daddy Jeff. Press F to pay respects.

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