In director Stephen Sommers‘ much-loved 1999 film The Mummy, characters played by Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, and John Hannah battle Arnold Vosloo’s titular supernatural being. In real life, the cast found themselves dealing with more real-life dangers in the form of the local wildlife they encountered while shooting in Morocco.
“There were bugs that looked like armored vehicles going around,” Fraser told EW for a 20th-anniversary article about the movie which you can read in the current issue of EW. “The locals thought it was fun to get one and stick it in an empty water bottle and scare you with it. Like, ‘Woooo!’ I’m like, ‘Aaaaaaaaargh!’ There were guys surrounding wherever we were shooting [with] poles. You’d see one or two of them just climbing up a pile of rocks and they’d all start stabbing at the rocks for a while. I asked, ‘What are those guys doing?’ ‘Oh, they’re the snake killers.’”
And speaking of snakes…
“They sent a memo out on the call sheet describing a type of snake that, I think, it had yellow dots on it,” says Fraser. “They said, ‘If you see this kind of snake, do not go near it. Walk — or run away. Because, at best, if it bites you, maybe they’ll amputate your limb. Anyway, there I was, pissing down a rock, and I look down, and there’s the yellow dot snake. I was like, ‘F—!‘ I just ran for it.”
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