Kayla Watts is a former Air Force pilot, and now she kind of flies freelance for whoever is paying the most money. And that’s probably why you love her: Because she’s a woman who knows her worth.

She has a very sort of classic action hero feel to her. Are there any classic action heroes that you used as inspiration?

I mean, Harrison Ford. It’s early career Harrison Ford. There’s nothing like that kind of swagger. Sometimes, I think about how Jeff Goldblum in “Independence Day,” how he struts at the end of that movie. So I really did — there were a lot of cues that I thought about what it means to have her speed, what it meant to have her posture. Her posture is … more substantial and better than mine. I’m a sloucher. So yeah, there were certain little physical markers that I really latched onto for her.

There are some really cool things in the plane. Obviously there is her parents’ picture [that] stands out, but what other little character nods should we be looking for in there?

Man, some of them are inside jokes. My husband’s Jamaican. There’s a Jamaican flag in there. I’m obsessed with the — there were these beads, which, any Black family in America who goes to their grandparents’ house, in the kitchen, there’s beads that are hanging down from the things. This is horrible, but Colin [Trevorrow], he didn’t realize it until the end, but one of my Easter eggs is Kayla’s hair.

So Kayla has her baby hairs. Her baby hairs are gelled the entire movie. They’re gelled the entire movie. She literally makes it through this movie unscathed so much so that she doesn’t sweat out her baby hairs. And that’s just a gift for all of us. [laughs]

I did notice that, by the way!

Did you notice?

I did! I totally did! What about working with the original actors? 

It was a gift. For whatever odd, serendipitous fortune of fate, I’ve worked with Sam Neill. We literally hung out. When we working on “Invasion,” it was over about a month in New Jersey and upstate New York, and I’m not kidding, we went to lunch together. We were shopping together. So I already knew. It was kind of like foreshadowing, because this was the fall of 2019. And then next thing I know, it’s the summer of 2020 into the fall. We’re watching movies on Mondays because that’s what we do on Mondays. [laughs] We’re enjoying after-meals drinks — or tea, if you’re me, because that role required a lot on Saturday nights. So it was really surreal and quite a beautiful and treasured and, God willing, will likely never happen again moment of cast cohesion, for sure.