If the sight of Jack Black running around the jungle in the Anaconda trailers inspires you to have feelings of deja vu, it’s totally understandable: he’s been spending a lot of time in the wild as of late. Earlier this year, fans saw him doing some big time adventuring in A Minecraft Movie, and we are not that long removed from his work on both Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle and Jumanji: The Next Level (and the next movie is coming soon!). That’s a lot of time spent out in nature – but according to the star, nothing to date has compared to creature creepiness that he experienced in the making of Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder.
While Anaconda might feature Black working alongside a real snake, he recently told USA Today that nothing that happened in the making of the new action movie was akin to what he witnessed in the making of the beloved 2008 meta war movie. The actor was asked about running into “wild critters” while shooting in exotic locales like Australia and New Zealand, and he explained that the “worst” he encountered was actually in the United States:
The worst actually was in Hawaii. If you go down into Kaua'i, I did that for Tropic Thunder; it gets real jungly. Somebody on the crew got bit by a centipede and you could hear him yell from like a mile away. Centipedes are no joke, dude. When you look at those close up, they have Satan's face, and apparently their bite is brutal.
Being an individual who freely admits to being terrified by basically anything with more than four appendages, I can’t say that I actually needed a warning from Jack Black to stay away from centipedes. That being said, because I’ve always been principally freaked out by the thought of all of those legs walking along my skin (shudder), I didn’t actually know how rough the arthropod’s bite could be.
Doing some quick research via WebMD, one discovers that centipedes are not deadly to humans, but they do have venomous pincers that they will use against humans if provoked. Different species of centipedes cause different reactions, but the effects of “bites” can be exacerbated by allergic reactions. Pain is certainly among the most common side effects, so Jack Black’s story checks out in that regard.
In Anaconda, the actor doesn’t have any scenes with insects, but he does have experiences with the titular giant snake, which not only bites but famously wraps around its prey and crushes it. If you’re into that sort of thing – in addition to the paired comedic stylings of Jack Black and Paul Rudd – you’re in luck, as the new comedy blockbuster is now playing in theaters everywhere.
