Scarlett Johansson landed Jurassic World Rebirth’s lead role after chasing an opportunity for many years and being a “really crazy” Jurassic Park fan over the decades

The first Jurassic World: Rebirth trailer promises a return to the series’ adventure roots while also pushing its world and central ideas forward. It stars Scarlett Johansson, and while that might sound like a surprising win for Universal, she’d been trying really hard to join this universe for the longest time.

We’d already heard some of this in the past, but Vanity Fair’s ‘first look’ interview (via Variety) with the main creatives and cast members of Rebirth shed further light on Johansson’s involvement and how long she’d been chasing an opportunity to enter Jurassic World.

“I was really crazy about the [original] film, and I slept in a ‘Jurassic Park’ pup tent in my bedroom I shared with my sister for a year… Anytime the trades would report a new ‘Jurassic’ movie, I would forward to my agents,” she revealed. Johansson’s big-screen breakthrough happened around the end of the 1990s or the beginning of the 2000s depending on who you ask, so this search for a Jurassic role could’ve started way before 2015’s Jurassic World. In fact, one of her very first blockbuster roles was in Eight Legged Freaks (2002), a monster action-adventure flick about giant spiders.

Of course, after Iron Man 2 (2010), her commitments to the Marvel machine would get in the way of potential big-screen opportunities in another cinematic universe, making a jump to Jurassic World difficult to work out. That didn’t stop her from orbiting around the productions whenever she could though; while shooting Black Widow in 2020, “Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard were next door on a soundstage filming Jurassic World Dominion,” so she fought hard to get a peek at what they were up to.

Eventually, she met with Steven Spielberg (who’s remained aboard the franchise as a producer) and told him she was a “superfan” while remaining tight-lipped about the whole pup tent deal and other ‘rabid fan’ stories, because she wanted to avoid looking “desperate.” Famous actors are very similar to us sometimes, I guess.

With Black Widow currently dead in the MCU and her ‘flashback movie’ sorted out, Johansson finally managed to join the Jurassic World series last year, and with the first preview promising the start of a new era, chances are that we’ll be seeing more of her past this year’s Jurassic World: Rebirth, which opens on July 2.