It’s impossible to imagine Jurassic Park without Jeff Goldblum‘s Ian Malcolm, a character so beloved that he’s been brought back for this year’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. But in a chat with Vanity Fair this week, wherein he broke down his career on a movie-by-movie basis, Goldblum revealed that Malcolm was almost cut from the script!

“I got a call… ‘Steven Spielberg wants to meet you… read the book first’… [so I] read that Michael Crichton book [and thought] ‘Ian Malcolm… wow… smart, funny, interesting character’… [Spielberg] was so nice,” Goldblum recalled. “He said, ‘Ya know, there’s a sort of movement afoot with our little committee here, as we’re rewriting another version of the script, to have that part removed from the script. So since we’ve had this meeting, there’s this little wrinkle that may render this moot.’ I kinda said… I felt like I had to advocate for my inclusion.”

Goldblum continued, “[Spielberg said] ‘The people want to make that character sort of melded into the Alan Grant character.’ Anyway, it turned out that I got to be in it.”

Malcolm of course went on to be the primary protagonist in Spielberg’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park II, proving just how integral Goldblum’s inclusion was to the series.