Taylor Kitsch is terrified of snakes. That makes his first big-screen acting gig in “Snakes On A Plane” especially scary.
The Kelowna, B.C.-native was on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” this week to promote his latest project, the crime drama “21 Bridges”, when host Jimmy Kimmel asked about his first-ever acting gig. For those who can’t recall the finer details of the plot, “Snakes On A Plane” starred Samuel L. Jackson as an FBI Agent trapped on a plane full of poisonous snakes.
Calling the whole experience “brilliant,” Kitsch, 38, reveals he was surprised by some real, live snakes during filming.
“I hate snakes. I genuinely hate them,” Kitsch prefaces the story, describing how his character Kyle is the first to die. After dying by snakebite in the plane’s lavatory, Kyle’s corpse dramatically falls into the aisle when the door is open.
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After undergoing 13-hours of makeup to look like a snakebite victim’s corpse, Kitsch’s big reveal has him falling out of the door and onto a rubber mat playing dead, “holding your breath and all that fun stuff.”
“They open the door, I fall down. No one tells me, but off-camera, there’s two guys behind the seats pouring live snakes on top of me,” he says. “I’m not kidding. No one told me.”
“I’m holding my breath, trying to be dead, which obviously did not happen,” he continues. “I lost it.”
Kitsch says the director did come out and apologize to him and ensure him they were not poisonous. “But that was intense,” he adds.
