The movie Prey hit Hulu last Friday, and immediately scored with longtime fans of the Predator franchise and critics alike. It’s “Certified Fresh” on the Rotten Tomatoes ratings aggregator, debuting with a 96% critics score, despite little of the marketing blitz that usually accompanies a franchise reboot.
It also became Hulu’s #1 premiere to date, and the most-watched film on Star+ and Disney+ in foreign territories.
Indigenous actress Amber Midthunder plays Naru, a young Commanche woman whose tribe happens to find itself sharing hunting grounds with the series’ titular alien hunter species in the year 1719, as it works its way up the chain to the planet’s apex predators, from animal to man.
Midthunder recently told Good Morning America‘s Ginger Zee that the 1987 original starring Arnold Schwarzenegger came out in theaters some 10 years before she was even born and that she didn’t even realize she was trying out for a Predator movie.
“I mean, it’s very exciting. It’s only now … kind of setting in,” she told GMA.
She also shared a secret about the movie’s scene stealer, Coco, the American dingo dog who played her faithful furry companion, Sarii. “She’s not a trained movie dog, she was a dog [adopted and] trained for this movie because she happened to be the right breed for the time period and the location,” Midthunder explained.
“So they had to teach her all the movie things. And a huge part of it is, like, I talk to her a lot, so she had to look me in the eyes. So to teach her to look me in the eyes, I had a pair of glasses with the eyes popped out and a nail on the front and they would stick a piece of meat on it. So she would stare at it … and then … eat the meat off my face.”
“It was very high tech,” Midthunder giggled.
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