Freya Allan, the main human star in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, couldn’t keep her emotions in check as she watched the latest installment of the iconic franchise for the first time.

“I was just sobbing,” the British actor told Inverse, recalling her initial viewing during the process of re-recording her audio in post-production. “I bawled my eyes out. It was towards the end of the film as the music was pumping, there’s this epic score, and that was it, I was gone. And I was like, ‘Sorry guys, I'm going to need to take a second.’”

You could chalk this up to a life-changing role — this is the rising star’s first major lead in a feature, after all — but this might just as likely speak to Allan’s strength as an actor. In Kingdom, as well as Allan’s 2019 breakthrough role in The Witcher, her wide green eyes, stern and sincere countenance, golden hair, and ability to convey deeply affecting moments stand out like a flower in a swamp. She plays the innocent underdog in each role, and as such is the emotional center of these franchises. It seems it’s a part she was born to play.

Now, with a piece of cinematic history under her belt, the 22-year-old is hungry for more challenges — and perhaps roles that don’t require days upon days of crawling in the dirt.

There is no doubt that the special effects in The Phantom Menace were groundbreaking. When Jar Jar Binks and Watto hit the screen, complaints about the characters had more to do with their function in the story (and what some felt to be their problematic undertones) rather than their visual design.

According to producer Rick McCallum — who got his start at Lucasfilm working on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles before producing movies for the studio all the way up to Red Tails in 2012 — there was only one shot in The Phantom Menace that wasn’t manipulated with computer-generated imagery, which means just about everything was run through the computer.

The emphasis on CGI was largely a marketing technique that backfired, though. Although there was a substantial amount of CGI, there were more physical effects and models built for The Phantom Menace than the entire classic trilogy combined.

But how did Lucasfilm and Industrial Light and Magic build the technology to produce such a film that still looks modern but timeless after 25 years? And how did it change the production pipeline for Lucasfilm for all time?

Famously, the work Industrial Light and Magic did on Jurassic Park helped push the computer-generated technology forward in a meaningful way, but McCallum tells Inverse that the testbed for this technology was actually The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.