If you prefer your Anaconda with buns, hun, you’re in for a real treat.
Holiday moviegoers learned the 2025 installment of the action-horror franchise features a surprise cameo from Jennifer Lopez, star of the original 1997 movie.
The recent, more comedic, film of the same name is directed by Tom Gormican and stars Jack Black and Paul Rudd as lifelong friends Doug (Black) and Griff (Rudd) who pursue their dream of remaking their favorite movie, Anaconda, only to find themselves terrorized by a real-life, deadly giant anaconda.
Instead of reprising her character from 28 years ago, Lopez plays an exaggerated version of herself in the meta remake, the sixth film in the Anaconda franchise. We won’t get into full plot spoilers, but she appears at the end of the film, where she visits Doug to tell him she “saw your little movie, and I loved it,” and that they are making a new Anaconda movie, and she wants him to direct it.
Columbia Pictures
The real Lopez starred in the original opposite Jon Voight, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz, and Owen Wilson. That version, directed by Luis Llosa, focused more on thrills and chills, with a plot centered on a documentary crew that ventures into the Amazon rainforest to help a snake hunter (Voight) track down a legendary — and lethal — serpent.
Lopez starred as Terri Flores, the doc’s director who ultimately shoots the anaconda dead and survives, after several members of her crew are killed by the bloodthirsty beast.
Anaconda was released just weeks after Lopez’s major star turn in the biopic Selena, and became her first box-office hit.
Lopez is not the only member of the original Anaconda crew to appear in the new version. As previously announced, Ice Cube also plays a version of himself. However, the cast kept Lopez’s cameo under wraps before the film’s premiere, but spoke more openly about it in new interviews released on Christmas Day.
“We were always thinking that it would be fun to have the surviving members,” Gormican told Variety. “So we just kept reaching out.”
Sony Pictures Entertainment/YouTube
And in a joint interview with Rudd for Entertainment Tonight, Black had to describe the cameo to his costar since Rudd did not share a scene with Lopez. The Minecraft Movie star said the scene “was fun” and called it an “Easter egg button.”
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“I think they were happy to jump in and celebrate their own, you know, achievement,” Black mused to the outlet of Lopez and Ice Cube’s returns. “I think they were like, ‘Wait a second, that sounds like fun.’ They wanted to be part of it. So, I think it was an easy sell [to get them].”
Anaconda, also starring Steve Zahn, Thandiwe Newton, Daniela Melchior, Selton Mello, and Ione Skye, is in theaters now.