FILM
With these honors, acting dogs in movies and their trainers are finally getting the recognition they deserve
►WHEN THE TEMPERATURE DROPPED BELOW 70 degrees, the Strays movie crew had to bring in a heating pad because Benny, the Boston terrier that plays Bug, didn’t like his paws on wet grass, Josh Greenbaum, the film’s director, said.
“But his performance is great. So, whatever he needs for his process,” Greenbaum told Total Film.
It’s no surprise that the comedy Strays is taking home more than one PAWSCARS Award. Thirty years after Homeward Bound, the R-rated film relies nearly entirely on dog actors. Three of the four main characters had never acted in a film before and Benny could not be further from his character’s tough, street dog persona.
Benny’s performance is rivaled by his new friend Reggie, played by a Border terrier named Sophie. The lead of the film, she used head tilts and varying walking paces to convey the emotion of a dog whose naïveté gives way to a newfound independence. In one scene, Reggie crawls under a fence while the other dogs hold it open for him and, in another, Bug pulls off Reggie’s bandana. It’s a scene that showcases the moment the dogs decide to become a pack with one mission—and one that took several combinations of behaviors (and trainers) to get right.
Sophie didn’t always have a pack, though. She was the only dog in her litter and, being a COVID puppy, didn’t socialize with other dogs until she was on the film set, which makes her performance even more impressive. “She was like, ‘I’m made to do this,’” Mathilde de Cagny, a long-time trainer who worked on Strays, told Newsweek.
A successful performance requires the animal to not only perform the behavior but be engaging. The dog needs to convey the scene’s emotion, such as wagging their tail to signal happiness, according to trainer Bill Berloni, who has worked on shows including And Just Like That. The goal is to make the trainer, who’s working with hand and noise signals, invisible to the audience.
“You want to make the movie fluid and organic so there’s no obvious trainer on site,” De Cagny said. “You fade away as a trainer and get the dogs used to working off other actors and other dogs.”
In the drama The Creator, a little girl’s dog is held at gunpoint while a soldier presses villagers for information. The small brown dog, whose real name is Gollum, is calm in the soldier’s arms despite people screaming and crying and the gun just inches from its face. Its facial expressions mimic a dog looking for its owner, who’s just feet away.
Red flags in films for Berloni are when a dog is panting, its eyes are darting around or it’s doing a hard star
