Bryce Dallas Howard Reveals If She’d Return to ‘Jurassic World’ Franchise

Bryce Dallas Howard is not in the next Jurassic World movie — but she wouldn’t say no to returning to the franchise down the road.

When Howard, 44, appeared on Watch What Happens Live on Tuesday, June 10, to promote her new action-comedy Deep Cover, the actress fielded a question from one of the show’s viewers, who asked if she would ever return to the Jurassic series, given that the new movie Rebirth opens in theaters on July 2.

“I would definitely always come back as the character if that made sense. But I think it’s really right for the franchise to take the story in a different direction,” Howard said. “I mean, Jurassic has always been more about the dinosaurs than it’s been about the human characters, and so I think it’s wonderful.”

“Plus, Scarlett Johansson is in it and I’m like, obsessed with her. And Mahershala Ali,” she added.

Howard and Chris Pratt led 2015’s Jurassic World, 2018’s Fallen Kingdom and 2022’s Dominion, which marked the first films in the Jurassic franchise since 2001’s Jurassic Park III. In those movies, Howard played a character named Claire Dearing, an operations manager at the Jurassic World theme park on the fictional Isla Nublar.

2015’s Jurassic World sees Howard’s Claire and Pratt’s velociraptor trainer Owen Grady rescue Claire’s nephews after a dangerous new variant of a Tyrannosaurus rex escapes from its habitat. The subsequent two movies in the trilogy follow Claire and Owen on various rescue missions to save dinosaurs from extinction once more after the collapse of the theme park. Dominion additionally saw the return of original Jurassic Park actors Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum.

Howard previously told PEOPLE in 2022 that she was “really sad” to wrap her role as Claire in the Jurassic World franchise, though she reflected positively on her experience with the dinosaur-centric adventure movies.  “It’s very sad to say goodbye to something so wonderful. But also, I’m very excited for the folks who will carry the Jurassic saga forward, you know?” she said at the time. “It will be with a largely different cast and all of that, and that’s something that is to be celebrated.”

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In the new entry Rebirth, Johansson, 40, portrays “skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett,” who is “contracted to lead a skilled team on a top-secret mission” to an island research facility for the original Jurassic Park and incidentally comes into contact with a family whose boat capsized near the island. “There, in a terrain populated by dinosaurs of vastly different species, they come face-to-face with a sinister, shocking discovery that has been hidden from the world for decades,” reads an official synopsis for the movie.

Jurassic World: Rebirth is in theaters July 2.