Unlike Samuel L. Jackson, actress Sunny Mabrey needed more than just a film title to persuade herself to sign on for “Snakes on a Plane.”
“When I first read it, I was like, ‘OK … Samuel Jackson is doing this, and it’s about snakes on an airplane,’ ” she said at a press junket to promote the indie film “One Last Thing …,” in which she plays a supermodel. “And it’s pretty entertaining. I couldn’t stop reading it, and finally I was like, ‘OK, what a nice way to spend the summer.’ “
“Snakes,” which is set to open Aug. 28, stars Jackson as an FBI agent who escorts a key witness on a flight from Hawaii to L.A. A crime lord, knowing he’ll be incriminated by the testimony, schemes to have hundreds of deadly snakes set loose on the plane to eliminate the witness. Mabrey plays Tiffany, one of the unlucky flight attendants on the plane.
“There’s four of us. There’s not four at the end, but there’s four of us in the beginning,” Mabrey said. “The guys take care of the snakes and chop their heads off, but the girls–there’s one guy flight attendant–have the task of making sure everybody’s in their seat, sort of taking care of everybody. We’re ushering them here and there. So throughout the whole thing, we have to not only be terrified but take care of everybody else.”
The actress says shooting the film was intense, partly because of the constant action of the simulated plane itself.
“This is a huge lifesize replica inside a studio, and it was a luxury plane with an upstairs first class with a bar,” she said. “The airplane was on a [gimbal]. It was crazy because that thing would shake and there would be smoke and part of the plane got jerked up with holes.”
And, of course, there were the snakes.
“There was a 20-foot Burmese python, and that’s really the only real snake that I did a scene with,” she said. “There was a snake room with a snake wrangler, and we went in there all the time. I have a miniature pinscher, and I kept her in my trailer. I was like, ‘Don’t come out’ because if she got near that Burmese python, you wouldn’t even see a dent. It was that big.”
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Luckily, Mabrey was one of the few actors who didn’t have to touch her reptilian co-stars.
“I actually never have a snake on me, but pretty much everybody else did,” she said. “I mean, I never had that exact experience.”