'Anaconda' Director Reveals Major Cameo Happened Very Last Minute

There was a big cameo at the end of Anaconda and the director is sharing how it happened.

Tom Gormican co-wrote and directed the new comedic reimagining of the 1997 movie, which starred Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez.

In the new movie, longtime best friends Doug (Jack Black) and Griff (Paul Rudd) try to remake the “classic” Anaconda, but things take a turn when they go to the Amazon to film.

The movie features two cameos from the original movie’s stars and one of them didn’t get filmed until November, one month before the movie hit theaters!

Keep reading to find out more…

“That was also a product of reshoots. We tried to get it as part of principal photography, but we couldn’t make schedules coordinate,” Tom told THR about JLo‘s mid-credits scene. “We had always wanted a version of her to come in, and we talked about it and talked about it and talked about it. I was finally able to shoot her cameo a month ago on November 17. It was the very last thing we did. I was finishing up my final mix when I went to shoot it, and I dropped it into this [mid-credit] sequence that I was having built to accommodate it.”

“I never thought it was going to ultimately materialize, but it did, and we put it together,” he added. “So it happened very, very late in the game, but we did have the idea a long time ago.”

Tom also dished on Ice Cube‘s cameo, and the possibility of other stars from the OG movie.

“Throughout the different iterations of the ending, he came in in lots of different ways. I just said, ‘We’ve got an abandoned boatyard, so let’s have him collect flare guns. If he’s stuck there on a [ravaged] film set, he would’ve found them as a way to defend himself,’” he said of Ice Cube‘s appearance. “I shot it a little bit like a Western where he shows up in silhouette. We can’t see who he is, and he’s just shooting. And I thought that dropping the guns behind him in a trail would be a very fun, very Cube way to enter the story and save our characters.”

“We would’ve loved to have had a Jon Voight or an Owen Wilson cameo, but the fact of the matter was their characters died in the first movie,” Tom said. “The only reason those other returning actors are there is because they’re in the [legacy] sequel of the actual Anaconda movie being made. Of all things, we were like, ‘Oh, that reality is a bridge too far,’ so we couldn’t actually have them in there.”

If you missed it, find out what Ice Cube had to say about his cameo!