I often have trouble sympathising with actors who do their job in "extreme conditions." Sure, they say they suffer for their art, but they're also a few feet away from an air-conditioned trailer filled will croissants. And, yes, Leo slept in a dead horse or whatever for The Revenant, but he won an Oscar for it and got paid millions of dollars.
But there's not much that sounds worse than the filming conditions that the staff and actors faced on Predator. From ants to ticks and extreme heat, the Mexican jungle in the summer of 1987 sounded like a really shitty place to film a movie.
Take this story from Richard Chaves, who played Poncho in a new oral history of Predator from The Hollywood Reporter:
A lot of it was raw jungle that we were running through when we were in the week rehearsal. And we took a break one day, and I checked the area out, you know, where I was gonna sit my butt down, and laid down, and next thing I know I am covered in red ants. I was bitten almost 100 times down both my arms, and went into a little bit of shock, was running through the jungle ripping my clothes off, butt naked. They had a water tank, and I went into the water tank and just doused myself.
That sounds, well, unpleasant. And things didn't get much better for Chaves, who also had a pretty intense tick situation, too.
The very first day [Arnold] got back was a 15-, almost 16-hour day and I was in the shower just filthy. And the phone rings and I said "Hello?" and it's a woman's voice, and she goes, "Is this Richard?" I said "Yes it's Richard," and she goes "What are you doing?" And I said, "I'm in the shower picking ticks off my balls!" OK? And she started laughing. And I said "Who the hell is this?" She goes, "Richard it's Maria [Shriver, Schwarzenegger's then-wife], and I'm just calling to invite you up to have dinner. I'm inviting everybody up to have dinner so you can meet me," and then she started laughing again.
Anyway, at least they got to blow a bunch of shit up.
