Another day, another major studio erases an LGBTQ character from their movie. It’s quickly becoming an all-too-common trend in Hollywood where studios fail to portray non-heterosexual characters as such, often deleting scenes that hint at their LGBTQ identities or revealing a character is queer in a movie’s press tour, instead of where it counts – in the actual movie. It’s happened with Star Wars, Marvel, Fantastic BeastsBeauty and the Beast, and now it’s happened yet again in Jurassic Park franchise. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom almost gave us a queer woman of color, but then they deleted the one scene that referenced her queerness.

In J.A. Bayona’s Jurassic World sequel, Daniella Pineda plays Dr. Zia Rodriguez, a former Marine and paleo-veterinarian who visits the deserted theme park with Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard’s characters. In the film we don’t learn much about Zia besides her science knowledge and her excitement at seeing dinos in the flesh. But apparently, she was originally supposed to have a scene that references she’s gay.

During an interview with AOL Build, Pineda revealed that a scene was cut from the final film in which she tells Pratt’s Owen Grady she doesn’t date men. The deleted scene found Zia and Owen inside a military vehicle with a group of mercenaries when her character references her sexuality. The rest of that scene remains in the final film, but Pineda describes the part that was cut:


Pineda says the moment wasn’t “relevant to the story” and was cut for time, and considering the final runtime is over two hours, sure, I guess that could make sense. But it’s especially frustrating that, yet again, another franchise has erased an LGBTQ person from their movie. Because without that little moment, Zia is not represented as a queer woman of color in the movie despite whatever Pineda or anyone else may say in the film’s press tour. (I’ve seen the movie, and there’s no reference to Zia’s sexuality in it.) It’s the same for Donald Glover’s Lando in Solo: A Star Wars Story and Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie in Thor: Ragnarok – in interviews the actors may claim their characters are pansexual and bisexual, respectively, but when there’s zero evidence of it in either film, it doesn’t count.

Again and again studios want to get credit for representing the LGBTQ community when they put in no work to actually do so. Just because they claim a character is queer in the press doesn’t matter; filmmakers need to make the effort to show that on screen, whether it’s woven into the plot organically or a moment that explicitly mentions their identity; not those obnoxious “exclusively gay moments“ Disney loves. Until then, the pile of would-be queer characters only keeps growing, from Fantastic Beast 2‘s not-gay Dumbledore to Black Panther‘s cut gay flirtation scene and Thor: Ragnarok‘s deleted scene. I guess Bayona thought those few seconds of Pineda’s brief scene were better served showing dinosaurs and Chris Pratt do really dumb stuff for two hours.