She is now 42-years-old and walked the red carpet to support her former cast members who reprise their roles in the latest film.
The first Jurassic Park film was released in 1993 based on the 1990 novel of the same name by Michael Crichton. The franchise was brought back to life with the Jurassic World reboot in 2015. It came full circle this year with the last installment of the reboot trilogy Jurassic World Dominion that reunited the original cast, Dr. Alan Grant, Dr. Ellie Sattler, and Dr. Ian Malcolm played by Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum respectively.
They were also joined by other memorable characters including the two kids Lex and Tim Murphy, who made the whole Jurassic adventures even more relatable to kids in the '90s. Now, 29 years after the original release, pre-teen Lex is now all grown up.
The child actress who played Lex, Ariana Richards, attended the Los Angeles premiere of Jurassic World Dominion earlier this week. She is now 42-years-old and walked the red carpet to celebrate the release of the latest film in the Jurassic film franchise. Fans had speculated in the days leading up to the release of Dominion that her character would be included in the film. But her appearance at the premiere does not have anything to do with that. She was there to support her former cast members.
Richards was a child actor who later went on to focus on her career as an artist. Other than Jurassic Park and its sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, she also appeared in the Tremors, Tremors 3: Back to Perfection, and had roles in TV shows like The Golden Girls, Switched at Birth, and Boy Meets World. But perhaps the most memorable role she played will be that of Lex Murphy. "It's a film that touched so many people when it came out," she had said about the film in a 2011 interview. "It was one of those things where I just enjoyed the experience of creating the movie, and then everything that happened after, the whole landslide, was all a surprise. I was not prepared for the fact that huge numbers of people would recognize me on a daily basis."
She also recalled the wonderful friendships that developed on set, especially the one with director Steven Spielberg. “I got a sweet letter from Steven recently, where he said he recognized that I seemed to feel the same level of enthusiasm that he did coming to the set every day,” Richards told TODAY in 2018. “He said I always ran to the set because I was always so excited to get on camera.” Even though she has not been in front of the camera recently, she says that acting is in her blood. Her audition for the role of Lex should be proof enough for that.
"I was called into a casting office, and they just wanted me to scream," Richards recalled. "I heard later on that Steven had watched a few girls on tape that day, and I was the only one who ended up waking his sleeping wife off the couch, and she came running through the hallway to see if the kids were all right."
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