Why Did We Allow Jon Voight to Play a Paraguayan Man in Anaconda (1997)?

You’ve probably seen Anaconda, right? It’s just one of those movies that everybody has seen, somehow some way. A friend’s house, basic cable, maybe even a theater trip.

It’s one of those movies that is extremely 90s, especially as it was released during a time when major studios had the technology to render CGI monsters and other spectacles, but they simply could not avoid making them look terrible. (I find these dated effects charming in many cases, though.)

There’s another thing about Anaconda that is incredibly dated, but I do not find it charming, except as fodder to dissect in a medium such as this. I’m referencing, of course, Jon Voight’s attempt at portraying a Paraguayan man.

(I could’ve stopped that sentence at “Jon Voight,” of course. But we don’t need to get into all that here in my newsletter. [Unless one of you decides to pay for extra Voight content].)

If it’s been a while since you’ve seen Anaconda (I know you’ve seen it), Voight plays a river tracker named Paul Serone. As he tells the crew, he was studying to become a priest, but he “needed to see the real world.” (He says this right before chopping up a large fish.) He also says that his calling is “snakes,” which is…diametrically opposed to the priesthood in a fascinating way, now that I think about it.

As you know, there’s a rich tradition in the film industry of not knowing (or caring, perhaps?) how to portray people of other ethnicities on screen. It can be difficult to look back at Hollywood’s Golden Age knowing that its actors (mostly white men, of course) simply donned shoe polish or bronzer rather than hiring actors of color. There’s a context to it, but our modern brains have been conditioned to reject such images on sight.

Here’s the thing: Anaconda, as you may have guessed, does not belong to Hollywood’s Golden Age. It belongs to 1997, a time when America’s first Black president was enjoying a second term in office. A time when, quite frankly, studios should have known better.

But it gets tricky from here. Because Jon Voight did not amplify his white skin in any way for his role in Anaconda. Not even a cheap spray tan. And if you’ve been to Paraguay, or perhaps you’ve watched the World Cup, you know that Jon Voight would be considered…light-skinned in such a country.

“Don’t cast Jon Voight” was the easiest and most correct answer here, but seeing as Columbia Pictures did not do such a thing, there were two options: darken Jon Voight’s skin to have him appear more “Paraguayan,” or present him in his natural hue and hope the audience will buy it. They went with the lesser of these two evils, I think, but it certainly does not “work” in many different ways.

What did Jon Voight—who is from Yonkers, by the way—do to sink into this role? Two things. One: He grew out a gross little ponytail. (Was this meant to make him appear more “Paraguayan"? I could not say for sure, but I bet he thought it did.) Two: He affected the laziest of broad South American accents so he could deliver accidentally hilarious lines like “This river can kill you in a thousand ways” and “They strike, wrap around you, hold you tighter than your true love” and “Danger is exciting, huh Gary?”

His accent is less believable than the CGI snakes. And in a weird way, it makes Anaconda extremely rewatchable.

Anaconda is now streaming on HBO Max and is available to rent elsewhere.