Maisie Lockwood in Jurassic Park: Who She Is and Who Plays Her

Maisie Lockwood is the granddaughter of the wealthy Benjamin Lockwood, whose California estate is the setting for much of Fallen Kingdom, and Isabella Sermon plays her in both of her films. She is credited as Maisie Lockwood in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), directed by J. A. Bayona, where she is billed twelfth. In Jurassic World Dominion (2022), directed by Colin Trevorrow, the credit reads Maisie Lockwood / Young Charlotte Lockwood and she is billed eighth.

The second credit name is the clue to her origin, and the full explanation sits in the spoiler sections that follow.

She enters the saga in the fifth film in release order, so anyone following the Jurassic Park movies in order meets her only after the original trilogy and the first Jurassic World. She is not a returning face from the 1993 film, unlike Ian Malcolm or Henry Wu, and her story belongs entirely to the Lockwood family. For the ensemble around her, the Jurassic Park characters index lists the other main roles.

Maisie's closest bonds are with Owen Grady and Claire Dearing, and her oldest tie is to the Lockwood family she was made from. Benjamin Lockwood, played by James Cromwell, is her grandfather, and his death at the hands of Eli Mills (Rafe Spall) is a turning point of the estate sequence in Fallen Kingdom. Charlotte Lockwood, his late daughter, is the source of her DNA, so Maisie is both Lockwood's granddaughter in the household's eyes and a copy of his lost child.

Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) are with her through the mansion chase and then raise her in the Dominion cabin, and the closing scenes show the three of them living as a family. Blue, the last raptor, gives Maisie a second kind of kinship. Blue fights the Indoraptor, the hybrid that hunts Maisie through the mansion, and in Dominion the offspring that Maisie names Beta is taken along with her when mercenaries kidnap them both.

On the other side are the people who treat her as an asset. Mills sees the estate and its animals as stock for sale. In Dominion, Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), the Biosyn CEO, uses Henry Wu (BD Wong) to modify the locusts, and Wu's confession about her origin is the moment her genes become a possible cure. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) sits between the camps. He tells the government hearing at the end of Fallen Kingdom that people must live with the dinosaurs, and in Dominion he works for Biosyn yet helps expose Dodgson.

In my opinion, the strongest Maisie scene is the one with the least action: she chooses to open the doors at the Lockwood estate while gas fills the dinosaur holding area. Earlier children in the saga, such as Tim and Lex in Jurassic Park (1993), Eric in Jurassic Park III or Zach and Gray in Jurassic World (2015), survive an attack and are rescued. Maisie, by contrast, makes the decision that releases the dinosaurs into the world, and the whole of Dominion follows from it. It could be argued that this is the most consequential act by any child in the series.

The Indoraptor chase through the mansion comes second for me. The Indoraptor is a new hybrid sold at a secret auction, and watching it stalk a child through a house rather than a jungle gives the scare a domestic scale that the series rarely uses. Blue's fight and the Indoraptor's end on the skull display pay it off.

In Dominion, the naming of Beta is a small, quiet scene that comes just before mercenaries kidnap both Maisie and Beta and set the plot running. Wu's admission that Maisie came from Charlotte's DNA lands hardest of all for me, because it turns the clone twist from a Fallen Kingdom shock into the hinge of the finale. Perhaps the fairest summary is that the character works best when she is deciding something rather than running.