1987’s “Predator” is a blast partly because the movie takes the toughest guys from the 1980s and has them fight an alien warrior. You have Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Jesse “The Body” Venture, and … Shane Black? That’s right, Black has a small role in the first (and still the best) movie in the “Predator” franchise. He’s best known as a screenwriter and director, with titles like “Lethal Weapon,” “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” and “The Nice Guys” on his résumé, but he’s also an actor. In “Predator,” he plays Rick Hawkins, the youngest of the group of mercenaries who run into the titular creature during a rescue mission in the jungle. The comic book-loving radio operator gets killed off pretty quickly, and not because it suited the story.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, “Predator” producer John Davis revealed that he had been very impressed with Black’s script for “Lethal Weapon” and wanted him to do rewrites for “Predator.” They cast him as an actor basically to get him on set in the first place, but Black wasn’t willing to do two jobs at once. “We got him down there, and we asked him to do a rewrite, and he said he was an actor in the movie and not a writer,” Davis revealed. “So he was the first person we killed. He got killed seven minutes into the movie.” Hawkins provides a few moments of comic relief before his demise, letting viewers know that things are about to get very real in the jungle.
For Shane Black, Predator was a nice vacation
An untold truth of “Lethal Weapon” is that Shane Black wanted to trash the script. It’s a good thing he persevered because it became a buddy cop classic, and, according to Black, he parlayed his newfound success onto the “Predator” set. Speaking with the Los Angeles Times in 1990, Black said that he simply asked Joel Silver, a producer for both “Lethal Weapon” and “Predator,” if he could have a small role in the latter while it was in production in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. He doesn’t mention whether he knew about the producers actually wanting him to work on a rewrite at the same time, but he had a blast regardless. As he puts it, he spent much of his time outside of filming “reading a lot of books, hanging out in the jungle, dancing at Mexican discos.”
However, despite filming in a tropical location, Black couldn’t forget about all his obligations. He actually worked on a “Lethal Weapon” rewrite during this time in the jungle at the request of director Richard Donner, and he had another script in the works for “Monster Squad,” which he co-wrote with Fred Dekker (who was also his college roommate). Maybe it was for the best that Black’s Hawkins was killed off so quickly so that he could focus on other projects. And Black would have a full circle moment with the “Predator” franchise years later: He directed and co-wrote (alongside Dekker) 2018’s “The Predator” because, as long as Predators keep coming to Earth to hunt, there will be no shortage of movies to make about them.
