"I like animals inside and out," he says with a smile.Įven after nearly four decades handling dangerous snakes, Sylvester says he's never had a serious close call.
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He earns $500 to $1,000 a day for his work, which he calls "the kind of dream job no one tells you actually exists." Sylvester is a lifelong movie buff and animal lover, but he's not a vegetarian.
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"Except I haven't trained a walrus and I don't really care to."īesides hundreds of snakes and a freezer full of dead mice for feedings ("Sylvester's frozen zoo," he quips), Sylvester keeps wolves, chickens and turtles at his sprawling Reptile Rentals ranch. "I've trained just about every animal you can think of," he says. Though snakes are Sylvester's specialty, his animal experience extends beyond the reptile kingdom.
"My big criteria on this movie was do not hurt my snakes," says Sylvester, who names all his animals but then affectionately calls them "sweetheart." No snakes were injured during the production, he says - but Jackson "flogged the snot" out of the rubber stand-ins. Sylvester and the folks at American Humane, which oversees animal safety on the set, wouldn't have it any other way. "It actually helped with their performances because they were terrified," he says, noting that all the "radical snake action" and snake fatalities involved computer-generated reptiles. Though not all the human actors were fans of their animal co-stars, it was great to have the set crawling with snakes, Ellis says. Computer-generated snakes are awesome but a live, real snake is a live, real snake." "Plus it was crucial to include real snakes in the film. "He's probably the best at what he does," Ellis says. "Snakes" director David Ellis says hiring Sylvester was a "no-brainer." "We just figure out what they want and readjust the set to that," he says. They want to climb, he says, and they tend to move from warm to cool and light to dark.
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Sylvester knows how to coax snakes into camera-ready behavior by allowing them to do what they do naturally. "They're not that smart and I'm not that clever. "You can't make a snake do anything they don't want to do," he admits. What's his secret for training the crawly creatures? As a teen, he got a job at the Nairobi snake park and fell in love with the work. It was one of the biggest projects yet for the snake wrangler, who started catching reptiles as a kid growing up in Kenya. Sylvester rounded up his best performers - including a 22-foot-long Burmese python - and carted them to the set in Canada in plastic jars and picnic coolers. "Vermin wranglers is what we are," says the jovial 55-year-old herpetologist, owner of Reptile Rentals.
This is the office of Jules Sylvester, Hollywood snake wrangler and behind-the-scenes star of the upcoming movie "Snakes on a Plane."Ī professional animal trainer for 27 years, Sylvester has done more than 330 movies, plus countless commercials and photo shoots. Inside, hundreds of snakes, scorpions, lizards, leeches, tarantulas, beetles and cockroaches crawl about in clear plastic cages. Outside the front door, more than 100 black grasshoppers, each the size of a small rat, are pinned onto a plastic foam sheet, drying in the sun. The sign reads "Trespassers will be poisoned."
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