While critics lambasted Jurassic World: Dominion, the film was a global smash that made almost 1 billion at the box office. Dichen Lachman, who plays Soyona Santos, said she was interested in a spinoff for her character from the movie.
In an interview with The Illuminerdi, Lachman revealed she was very interested in her character’s backstory and wanted to give her as much depth as possible.
“I really wanted to ground her cause obviously it’s a world with dinosaurs, and it’s a fantastical world, but I wanted to find a way, like, how did she get to do what she’s doing?”
That meant that Lachman concocted a full narrative for Soyona, complete with a full origin story. She said that the character was “from Siberia and that her father was Russian and got extraordinary wealth through the aluminum wars in Siberia and her mother smuggled fossils because there are actually a lot of fossils in Mongolia. And I think there are the fighting dinosaurs, which are two Velociraptors that were also discovered in Mongolia. So I was like, I think the whole dinosaur thing came from her mother and her fossil smuggling days.”
The story, she said, “could be like a movie in and of itself.”
She also had input on Soyona in other ways as well. The original version of the character only carried a remote and a phone, but Lachman shared that she came up with something she felt was more interesting.
“I think she has something cooler than that. And I was thinking about gadgets. And so before I met (director Colin Trevorrow), I did all these sketches of like, maybe it’s a necklace, maybe it’s a bracelet. I designed this bracelet where the remote slides out, and I pitched it to him when I first met him in London. And he said, let me think about it. I like it, but let me think about it. And then, extraordinarily, he loved it.”
Lachman is on a bit of a career roll lately, with appearances in the Netflix show Altered Carbon, the TNT drama Animal Kingdom and a role in the critical darling Severance on Apple TV Plus. She attributes her success to fortunate circumstances.
“I don’t know how I got so lucky,” she said. “I’ve been so fortunate and blessed with my career and the roles I’ve been able to play.”
Jurassic World: Dominion is currently streaming on Peacock. You can check out the full interview with Lachman below.
