THE DEATH OF MATT HOOPER: IS THIS HOW SHARK SCIENTIST FROM JAWS FINALLY MET HIS FATE?
Hooper drives the boat, Chief. He also buys the wine and screws your wife - in the book at least. He is also a movie legend. The first cinematic scientist to make science cool, hip and dangerous, Hooper continues to inspire shark lovers around the world, young and old. But what happened to Matt Hooper after Jaws?
Played by an energetic Richard Dreyfuss, Hooper was the young, funny denim clad hipster coming from money sent by the Oceanographic Institute to solve Amity Island’s shark problem. In Peter Benchley’s source novel, Hooper was very different. He screwed Ellen and got killed by the shark.
“The fish bit down, and the last thing Hooper saw before died was the eye gazing at him through a cloud of his own blood.”
In the Jaws movie universe, originally Hooper died in the movie too. However, Matt lived due to a script rewrite when a real Great White shark got caught in the miniature anti-shark cage being used for the underwater cage scene (skip to 8 minutes in video below).
Of the three main characters, Quint was killed by the shark and Chief Brody was confirmed to have died of a heart attack. But what happened to Hooper? He survived the first shark in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and appeared to be alive and well up to at least Jaws 2 as he called the Brody home and spoke briefly to Ellen off screen. So what happened to Hooper?
While it has never been confirmed, and Dreyfuss saying he would never play Hooper again, Matt may already be dead.
The opening of Piranha 3D (2010) suggests that someone hinted to be Matt Hooper definitely needed a bigger (and more powerful) boat.
Wearing a grey sweatshirt, denim jacket and dark beanie ensemble, an old, overweight man is fishing alone in an open, calm lake… singing along to a familiar sea-shanty playing on the wireless.
However, without spoiling things too much, the calm and tranquil day’s fishing ends badly when a sudden underwater tremor sets free scores of the prehistoric man-eating fish, an unlikely group of strangers must band together to stop themselves from becoming fish food for the area's new razor-toothed residents. Watch the ‘death of Hooper’ below.
Words by Ross Williams
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