Before Laura Dern ever cracked open the script, she made one phone call that locked in her role as Dr. Ellie Sattler in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film, and kept her coming back for several sequels. Spielberg had already reached out and sent the pages her way, but Dern called Cage first.
The two had crossed paths on the set of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, and all she could tell him at that point was that “dinosaurs are gonna come back to life.”
“I just remember Nic being the person who, yeah, made me know I had to say yes instantly before learning more,” Dern shared on a December 2025 episode of the SmartLess podcast.
