On our next show due out on August 9, 2006, we have Snake-charmer to the stars Jules Sylvester.
Jules is a veteran snake wrangler and the owner of Reptile Rentals, a company that supplies snakes and other animals to the film and television industry. He has worked on more than 300 Hollywood movies involving snakes, lizards, spiders, and other creepy crawlers. But his latest job has made him a literal idol of fans. He is the main squeeze for none other than – “Snakes on a Plane.”
“Snakes On a Plane” features Samuel L. Jackson (who will also be appearing on our show in the very near future in an exclusive interview) as an FBI agent escorting a witness on a flight from Hawaii to Los Angeles when assassins release hundreds of deadly snakes on the plane.
Born in England, Sylvester developed his fascination with snakes as a child living in Kenya, where his father worked as an agricultural officer. As a teenager, he used to catch snakes and release them on a small island in Kenya’s Lake Naivasha that had seen a lot of illegal poaching.
“Poaching dropped off quite a bit once the word went around that some crazy white kid had planted snakes there,” Sylvester said.
He was hired as a student helper at the Nairobi Snake Park, where he cut grass and cleaned cages under the tutelage of James Ashe, the park’s curator.
“This is where I got my experience handling snakes,” he said. “It’s also where I learned how to leap over a five-foot [one-and-a-half-meter] wall without touching it when you get scared.”
Sylvester eventually moved to Zimbabwe, and started his own snake park in Victoria Falls.
In his career, he says he has caught about 10,000 venomous snakes. Yet he has never been bitten by a poisonous snake.
In 1977, Sylvester moved to California and started Reptile Rentals. At any given time, his shop has about 150 snakes on hand, as well as 50 tarantulas, dozens of frogs, scorpions, lizards, iguanas, and hundreds of thousands of cockroaches.
For “Snakes on a Plane,” Sylvester collected about 450 snakes, which he packed into a van and drove from Los Angeles to the shooting location in Vancouver, British Columbia. He says corn snakes were perfect for the job because they come in thirty-odd different colors, ranging from pure white to screaming red.
Learn all about Jules’ fun on the set of Snakes On a Plane this Wednesday on Slice of SciFi Show number 070.
