In addition to starring in Jurassic World Rebirth, Jonathan Bailey revealed that he also played a part in helping with the film’s score.
While appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the late night host brought up that he heard the actor helped score the film.
“This really was the highlight of my career,” Bailey said. “The nerd in me erupted like Vesuvius.”
Bailey explains that while performing in the Richard II theater production in London, Rebirth director Gareth Edwards told him they’d be recording Alexandre Desplat’s new score at the Abbey Road Studios which was nearby. He also said they’d be incorporating some from John Williams’ iconic original score.
Bailey said he visited to watch the “105-piece world-class orchestra” and “got goosebumps.”
“As the week progressed,” Bailey continued, “I came back and I was like, ‘Can I bring my clarinet?’ I played the clarinet in school — I told you it was a nerdy story — and on the Friday, they said, ‘Look, you can come.’”
Bailey said that he just wanted to play one note even if it was “one slightly sharp note” because it would’ve been a “dream come true.”
He manifested that dream because a clarinet solo eventually came up. Though Bailey admitted he was at initially hesitant and declined Desplat’s offer to play he then changed his mind because he would regret not taking him up on the offer for “the rest of my life.”
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When another clarinet solo opportunity came up Bailey recalled Desplat looking at him and saying, ‘It’s now or never.’”
“And I just went, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’ And I ended up playing the theme of Dr. Henry Loomis, the character I play in a Jurassic film on the clarinet, which is in the score.”
The actor explained that it proved to be a full circle moment given in 1993, the same year Jurassic Park premiered, his grandfather gave him his first clarinet.
“It just shows that if you find something you love and you commit to it, you never know how it comes full circle,” Bailey said. “But honestly, it was so emotional.”
Jurassic World Rebirth takes place five years after the franchise’s last film fronted by Chris Pratt. In the film, dinosaurs have begun to die out, except along the equator. A pharmaceutical company sponsors a mission — executed by Scarlett Johansson’s skilled covert operative, Mahershala Ali’s fixer and Bailey’s paleontologist — to collect genetic materials from the remaining dinos.
When Bailey, as Dr. Henry Loomis, touched a dinosaur on set, he said in his Hollywood Reporter cover story that it was an emotional experience. “Isn’t that what all humans are really trying to find in their life, the equivalent of their passion in its natural environment?” Bailey said of the emotional impact of the scene. “It doesn’t get more pure than that.”