Characters / Anaconda

Terri

Terri Flores

Played By: Jennifer Lopez

• Ms. Fanservice: It's J-Lo, after all. Very early on in the movie, there is a scene of her in a see-through slip with nothing on underneath.
• Honey Trap: Terri tries one of these on Serone, as part of The Mutiny. He sees through it but Westridge and Danny still knock him out.

Danny

Danny Rich

Played By: Ice Cube

• Manly Facial Hair: Danny has Ice Cube's trademark light beard around his lower face and is capable of fighting both Serone and the anaconda.
• Cutting the Knot: When Serone tries to take over and he and Gary propose capturing the snake, Danny says that he is just going to throw them both in the river if they keep talking like that. He is shut down by Serone pulling a gun.
• The Lancer: He seems to be Terri's oldest friend and main helper among the crew.

Serone

Paul Serone

Played By: Jon Voight

• Big Bad Ensemble: With the Anaconda.
• Big Bad Wannabe: As dangerous as Serone is, he’s still nothing compared to the snake. His plan to capture it is full of holes, and he ultimately gets himself killed.
• Didn't Think This Through: Even if Serone did manage to capture the snake alive, it is unclear how he would get it back to civilization, convince the crew he had been terrorising to help him out, or even restrain it in the first place.
• Evil Poacher: A snake poacher to be precise.
• Expy: Of Lewis Dodgson from The Lost World (1995). He even tries to drown the female protagonist, just like Dodgson.
• Faux Affably Evil: He is somewhat charming, but even a blind man could see that he is Obviously Evil from a mile away.
• Hate Sink: You can't hate the anaconda, but you CAN hate him. He manipulates and kills people in pursuit of profit.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Serone effectively engineers his own death by trying to capture the anaconda. He sets two people up as bait (he only needed one, if that, since he already had a dead monkey that worked as bait earlier) and his great plan to capture the snake? A net.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Definitely far more cruel, wicked and evil then the Anaconda.
• Jerkass: Not only is he evil, he’s also a massive, insensitive jackass. This is best scene when Gary dies and he gives a tactless prayer.
• Just Desserts: He is eaten by the very snake he was trying to capture.
• Lack of Empathy: When Gary is eaten by the snake, he gives a prayer so half-hearted it would’ve been more tactful to have said nothing at all.
• Manipulative Bastard: He tricks everyone into login down the river to his snake, while putting on a good show of being a helpful guy just wanting to get their friend to a hospital faster.
• Murderous Thighs: He kills Denise by locking his legs around her neck.
• Near-Villain Victory: His plan to use Terri and Danny as bait to capture the second anaconda almost succeeds — until the section of piping he tied the net to breaks, causing his whole strategy to unravel.
• Obviously Evil: From the very start, Serone comes across as intensely creepy. Everyone else is suspicious of him at first — Terri, Westridge and Cale in particular — and put up with him simply because they need help; he only ever manages to win over Gary by playing to his greed and stupidity.
• Psychotic Smirk: Sneers so much throughout the movie that he almost never fully closes his mouth.
• Sinister Minister: According to Serone, he was a priest at one point. He even administers half-hearted last rites for someone who he gets killed.
• The Sociopath: Serone is a cruel, apathetic and selfish man who will throw anyone to the snake as long as he gets to capture it.
• Villainous Rescue: He shoots a boar that is chasing Gary and Denise, saving their lives. His likely motivation is to earn the crew's trust and to preserve his cannon fodder.
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: Serone, possibly lying, claims to be from Paraguay. Voight's accent, however, is from nearly every single country in North, Central, and South America, most frequently Tony Montana's Cuba. Of course, given the diglossic ways that Paraguay's heavily Guaraní-influenced Spanish dialect (Jopará) contrasts sharply with other forms of Latin American Spanish, Voight's portrayal may still come off as a case of Accidentally-Correct Writing in marking Serone as a linguistic outlier despite its inauthenticity.

Denise

Denise Kalberg

Played By: Kari Wührer

• Critical Hesitation Blunder: She tries to kill Serone but pauses, and cries a bit when he tells her not to look into the eyes of someone she wants to kill. Then Serone jumps up and locks his legs around her neck.
• Ms. Fanservice: She is played by Kari Wührer, after all, wearing short shorts and a midriff-baring top. One scene also has her shirt partially unbuttoned to show her bra.

Gary

Gary Dixon

Played By: Owen Wilson

• Dumb Blonde: A rare male version. The only crew member to put his trust on Serone.
• Greed: One of the reasons he partners up with Serone to kill the anaconda is the fame he would gain for doing so.
• Minion with an F in Evil: When he decides to follow Serone, before he realizes that Serone has set the whole thing up. He is upfront and non-hostile in saying that he just thinks following Serone will get them out alive, and maybe with a film of the capture in the process.
• Too Dumb to Live: He thinks teaming up with the blatantly untrustworthy Serone is a good idea, and wholeheartedly believes that he has the best interests of the documentary crew at heart.

Westridge

Warren Westridge

Played By: Jonathan Hyde

• British Stuffiness: Classic Example
• Dirty Coward: Initially, such as when he is sufficiently freaked out enough to want to abandon the missing Matteo.
• The Dog Bites Back: Serone singles Westridge out as weak and submissive, and Westridge somewhat nervously tries to bite back by stammering that he is not Serone's 'poodle'. He gets a better moment later on when he knocks Serone the fuck out with a golf club.
• Heroic Sacrifice: While trying to wedge the boat free, the snake appears. He tells the others to get on the boat, then calls the snake toward him. A big growth from his Dirty Coward status.
• Hidden Depths: He takes the helm literally after Matteo's death.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Westridge comes across as a stuffy and even cowardly prick, but he is really not that bad and even becomes Fire-Forged Friends with the rest of the crew.
• Jerkass Has a Point: It sure isn't a nice thing to abandon one of your crew, but his logic is sound.
  Terri: We are not sure that Mateo is dead. We'll wait here till morning.
  Westridge: Are you insane? Where do you think he went? A walk in the woods?
• Man of Wealth and Taste: He loves Bordeaux wine and country club-style golf, and he brings both on the expedition.

Mateo

Mateo

Played By: Vincent Castellanos

• Aborted Arc: The reveal that he and Serone are working together seems rather pointless, since he dies first without doing much, if anything to help Serone besides picking him up.
• Black Dude Dies First: South American and the first of the crew to die.
• Wild Hair: He has stringy, dirty hair.

Cale

Dr. Steven Cale

Played By: Eric Stoltz

• Adventurer Archaeologist: He is an anthropologist, expert on locating isolated tribes. He is introduced having just hiked back through the jungle searching ahead for the documentary and is quite knowledgeable about the native lore and area.
• Big Damn Heroes: He tranquilizes Serone as he is about to shoot Danny and Terri.
• Convenient Coma: He spends a lot of the movie in a delirious state after being stung by a poisonous wasp Serone put in his wetsuit.
• Fanservice: Walks around with his shirt open exposing his chest and torso.
• New Old Flame: He and Terri have had some romance in the past.
• Nice Guy: He is very polite and considerate.

Poacher

Poacher

Played By: Danny Trejo

• Better to Die than Be Killed: He opts to shoot himself rather than endure a slow, painful death via giant fucking snake.
• Black Dude Dies First: The very first casualty of the film.

The Anaconda

The Anaconda

(loud shriek)

Played By: Frank Welker

• Artistic License – Biology: The Anaconda seemingly is able to digest any consumed victim almost instantly and return hours later to menace the expedition some more. In actuality, snakes have a very slow metabolism and a human-sized prey would take days or even weeks to fully digest.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Along with Serone and the second anaconda.
• Disc-One Final Boss: The Anaconda suffers a Surprisingly Sudden Death about an hour into the movie, when Terri shoots it twice in the head a it tries to attack the boat, at which point Serone becomes more menacing to the heroes and the existence of another, larger anaconda is revealed.
• Green and Mean: Primarily green in coloration, and is a vicious predator.
• Super-Persistent Predator: Largely averted, actually. The anaconda does not actively hunt the characters, and it is Serone's dogged insistence on hunting the anaconda that makes it so dangerous. After all, the characters blundered into its territory in the first place.

The Second Anaconda

When you can't breathe, you can't scream.

• Artistic License – Biology: While snakes can regurgitate consumed prey on command, they do not do so just for the sake of hunting and eating again. Rather, it's a defense mechanism to better help them escape should they be threatened. Needless to say, a full-grown Anaconda would not have much to fear from other predators and after eating a man-sized prey, would most definitely slither off somewhere to digest in peace.
• Big Bad: Outlives the first anaconda and kills Serone, marking it as the true main antagonist.
• Dark Is Evil: Dark-scaled, and far more sinister than its predecessor.
• Made of Iron: Takes several strikes with picks and such, and pursues Terri and Danny even while on fire.
• More Deadly Than the Male: The male was already deadly, but the female is much more persistent, and resiliant. On top of that, she chases the heroes with much more ferocity and aggression.
• Super-Persistent Predator: Played a lot straighter than with the first. It spits out a body it just swallowed so that it can pursue someone else, who is trying to run away.