Ken Watanabe is a Japanese actor. To English-speaking audiences, he is known for playing tragic hero characters, such as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi in Letters from Iwo Jima and Lord Katsumoto Moritsugu in The Last Samurai, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Among other awards, he has won the Japan Academy Film Prize for Best Actor twice, in 2007 for Memories of Tomorrow and in 2010 for Shizumanu Taiyō. He is also known for his roles in Christopher Nolan's films Batman Begins and Inception, as well as Memoirs of a Geisha, and Pokémon Detective Pikachu.
Anaconda is a 1997 American adventure horror film directed by Luis Llosa and starring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz, Jonathan Hyde and Owen Wilson. It focuses on a documentary film crew in the Amazon rainforest that is led by a snake hunter who is hunting down a giant, legendary green anaconda. The film received generally negative reviews, but was a box office success, grossing $136.8 million worldwide against a $45 million budget, and also became a cult classic. It was followed by a series of films.
Katana is a superheroine appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. First appearing in 1983, Katana is a samurai warrior whose skill with a sword allows her to fight for justice as a superheroine. Her tragic backstory includes the death of her husband, Maseo, whose soul becomes trapped in her blade, the Soultaker. Katana has been part of various DC Comics superhero teams, including the Justice League and Birds of Prey, but is most commonly associated with the Outsiders, a team of heroes hand-picked by Batman to act as his personal black ops team, handling riskier missions. Of the character's first appearances, one critic has noted, "The idea that a superhero would wield a sword which caught the souls of the wielder’s victims was not very superhero-y. But Katana was from the start a rough and tumble character happy to use throwing stars as weapons ."
Nicholas Edward Gonzalez is an American actor. He is best known for portraying the roles of Alex Santiago on the Showtime television series Resurrection Blvd, Dr. Ben Douglas in Anacondas 2004 and Dr. Neil Melendez on the ABC television series The Good Doctor.
Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid is a 2004 American adventure horror film directed by Dwight Little. It is a stand-alone sequel to the film Anaconda (1997) and the second installment of the Anaconda film series. The film follows a team of researchers set for an expedition into the Southeast Asian tropical island of Borneo, to search for a sacred flower which they believe will bring humans to a longer and healthier life. They soon become stalked and hunted by the deadly giant anacondas inhabiting the island.
Brian Manion Dennehy was an American actor of stage, television, and film. He won two Tony Awards, an Olivier Award, and a Golden Globe, and received six Primetime Emmy Award nominations. Dennehy had roles in over 180 films and in many television and stage productions. His film roles included First Blood (1982), Gorky Park (1983), Silverado (1985), Cocoon (1985), F/X (1986), Presumed Innocent (1990), Tommy Boy (1995), Romeo + Juliet (1996), Ratatouille (2007), and Knight of Cups (2015). Dennehy won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Miniseries or Television Film for his role as Willy Loman in the television film Death of a Salesman (2000). Dennehy's final film was Driveways (2020), in which he plays a veteran of the Korean War, living alone, who befriends a young, shy boy who has come with his mother to clean out his deceased aunt's hoarded home.
Rick Yune is an American actor, screenwriter, producer and martial artist of Korean descent. His most notable roles have been in the movies Snow Falling on Cedars, the first Fast and Furious film The Fast and the Furious, the James Bond movie Die Another Day, and Olympus Has Fallen. He was part of the main cast of the Netflix original series Marco Polo.
Louis Charles Hayward was a South African-born, British-American actor.
Katherine Dee Strickland is an American actress. From 2007 to 2013, she played Charlotte King on the ABC drama Private Practice (2007–2013).
Salli Richardson-Whitfield is an American actress, director and producer. Richardson is known for her role as Angela in the film A Low Down Dirty Shame (1994) and for her role as Dr. Allison Blake on the Syfy comedy-drama series Eureka (2006–2012).
Johnny Messner is an American film and television actor best known for his portrayal of a muscular military man in the 2004 film Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid.
Matthew Marsden is an English-American actor, producer, singer and former model. He has appeared in films such as Black Hawk Down, Helen of Troy, Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid, Tamara, Resident Evil: Extinction, Rambo, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and Atlas Shrugged.
Eugene Byrd is an American actor. He is best known for playing Wink in the film 8 Mile and Dr. Clark Edison on the FOX series Bones.
Nicholas Hope is a British-born Australian actor, known for the lead role in the 1993 film Bad Boy Bubby.
Neville Anderson known professionally as Andy Anderson and also billed as Andy James, is a New Zealand musician and actor who worked a lot in Australia. As a musician he is best known as the lead singer of 1960s band The Missing Links, and as an actor he is well known for his roles on both Australian and New Zealand television.
Memoirs of a Geisha is a 2005 American epic period drama film directed by Rob Marshall and adapted by Robin Swicord from the 1997 novel of the same name by Arthur Golden. It tells the story of a young Japanese girl, Chiyo Sakamoto, who is sold by her impoverished family to a geisha house to support them by training as and eventually becoming a geisha under the pseudonym "Sayuri Nitta." The film centers around the sacrifices and hardship faced by pre-World War II geisha, and the challenges posed by the war and a modernizing world to geisha society. It stars Zhang Ziyi in the lead role, with Ken Watanabe, Gong Li, Michelle Yeoh, Youki Kudoh, Suzuka Ohgo, and Samantha Futerman.
Rila Fukushima is a Japanese fashion-model and actress best known for her comic book roles in film and TV and has appeared in projects such as the superhero film The Wolverine (2013) as Yukio, the TV series Arrow as Tatsu Yamashiro, and Ghost in the Shell (2017) as the Red-robed Geisha.
Jack Epps Jr. is an American screenwriter, author, and educator, known chiefly for such popular 1980s films as Top Gun, Legal Eagles, and The Secret of My Success, which he wrote with longtime partner Jim Cash. Epps Jr. graduated from the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University, and he has since gone on to teach at the University of Southern California.
Anaconda is an American horror film series created by Hans Bauer, Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. Produced and distributed by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, the series began with Anaconda (1997) directed by Luis Llosa, and was followed by one theatrical stand-alone sequel, Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid (2004) directed by Dwight Little, and three television sequels, Anaconda 3: Offspring (2008), Anacondas: Trail of Blood (2009), both directed by Don E. FauntLeRoy, and Lake Placid vs. Anaconda (2015) directed by A.B. Stone and being a crossover with the Lake Placid film series. Along with a 2024 Chinese remake of the same name, Anaconda (2024) directed by Xiang Qui Liang and Xiang He Sheng. Each installment revolves around giant man-eating anacondas and the efforts of various groups of people to capture or destroy the creatures. The fictional plant known as the Blood Orchid and the company Wexel Hall Pharmaceuticals as well as the fictitious Murdoch family are repeatedly referenced in the films.
The third season of the American television series Arrow premiered on The CW on October 8, 2014, and concluded on May 13, 2015, with a total of 23 episodes. The series is based on the DC Comics character Green Arrow, a costumed crime-fighter created by Mort Weisinger and George Papp, and is set in the Arrowverse, sharing continuity with other Arrowverse television series. The showrunners for this season were Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim and Andrew Kreisberg. Stephen Amell stars as Oliver Queen, with principal cast members Katie Cassidy as Laurel Lance, David Ramsey as John Diggle, Willa Holland as Thea Queen, Emily Bett Rickards as Felicity Smoak, Colton Haynes as Roy Harper, John Barrowman as Malcolm Merlyn and Paul Blackthorne as Quentin Lance also returning from previous seasons.
