Meet The Best Animal Actors of the Year

Independent film shoots typically take about 40 days, while big-budget blockbusters go for 120. Good Boy, a low-budget horror movie that premiered last October, took 412 days to film. It was the fault of the movie’s star, a very handsome first-time actor named Indy. He had a limited attention span and almost always refused to stay still during his close-ups. When he got tired, he simply stopped responding to directions. Many days, he’d give the director, Ben Leonberg, just a few seconds of usable footage. “We really had to cater our entire process to him and his abilities,” explains Kari Fischer, the film’s coproducer and Leonberg’s wife.

Being patient with Indy was worth the trouble: Good Boy, which cost $70,000 to make, earned $8.7 million at the box office. The Guardian called it “often ingenious,” and The New York Times declared Indy a “breakout star.” His sometimes erratic behavior simply came naturally to him, for he is an 8-year-old, 35-pound Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever.

Hollywood’s human actors are recognized and appreciated (and maligned, but hey, all press is good press) every day. Meanwhile, their animal costars often don’t even get a credit on IMDB. Sure, there’s the Palm Dog Award at the Cannes Film Festival, but that’s just one film festival and one species. What about the animals with two legs, or hooves instead of paws?

This portfolio celebrates some of the finest animal actors of 2025. To make it happen, W’s staff watched just about every movie released last year that featured an animal. Some publicists tried to nominate “starring” creatures that appeared in the background of a single scene, entirely out of focus. They were not eligible. The ones that made the cut—from Indy, the dog, to Bertha, the sheep—had roles that startled and delighted us.

Much like their human counterparts, these actors can be difficult to pin down. For example, Panda, an Icelandic sheepdog, who won the Palm Dog for her performance as the family pet in The Love That Remains, was unable to participate because she was on location in Iceland. And, as it turns out, animals have neuroses, egos, demands, and monetary concerns. It’s impossible to discern if the issue lies with the client, the agent, the studio, or all of the above. Sometimes an animal with a small but pivotal role in a hit film sells out, books a Super Bowl commercial, and then feels entitled to an exorbitant appearance fee. But most animal stars, including all the ones featured here, are not just very talented but also a joy to work with. As Elizabeth Taylor, who shared the screen with the most famous animal actor of all time—the collie Pal, aka Lassie—once said, “Some of my best leading men have been dogs and horses.”

Bing, The Friend

The Friend needed a male lead with balls. In the film, a writer (Naomi Watts) inherits Apollo, a Harlequin Great Dane, after his owner and her mentor (Bill Murray) commits suicide. “The dog needed to be male and intact,” explains Bev Klingensmith, Bing’s trainer and owner. (That detail plays a small but essential part in a scene.) While Bing, a fourth-generation dog show champion from Iowa, had never acted before, he had years of obedience classes under his collar. To look depressed, Bing would “pancake”—chin down, eyes up. On set in New York, he ate chicken and steak in his very own trailer, and had the couch removed to make room for his crate. Since the movie premiered last spring, Bing has been getting recognized. “I had a gentleman stop us on the street and FaceTime his wife,” says Klingensmith. “He told me it was like meeting Robert De Niro.”

Jake, Sinners

“You cannot, nor should you, bring a rattlesnake into a production office,” says Dave Milliken, the animal coordinator on Ryan Coogler’s vampire epic Sinners. Instead, his three venomous timber rattlesnakes—Jake, Lucy, and Kaa—were cast via a self-tape audition that showed their size and strike distance. In a brief but symbolic scene, Sammie (Miles Caton) clears palmettos from a wagon to find a hissing snake; Smoke (Michael B. Jordan) comes to the rescue and stabs it. Three snakes were hired for the role, because “you do not train a rattlesnake; you read their body language,” explains Milliken. “If one’s not behaving—whether it’s being too feisty or just not wanting to do anything—we’ll swap it out,” says Karen Milliken, Dave’s wife and co–animal coordinator. On set, the Millikens brought a medic, lined up a helicopter for emergency air-lifting, coordinated antivenom with local hospitals, and maintained a clear exit route at all times. Their neighbor in Louisiana, John Luke Pichon, who was in Sinners as a stuntman, stood in as Caton’s hand double for the scene. It required several weeks of training. “My heart was racing,” says Pichon. “The snake was striking—he was pretty mad.”

Noochie, Sorry, Baby

No one at the Berkeley Humane shelter in California thought that Noochie, a gray tabby who was the last in his litter to be adopted, would be a movie star. And yet he became a Sundance Film Festival darling after his turn in Sorry, Baby, Eva Victor’s off-kilter campus drama. “Noochie is dumb as rocks and sweet as sugar,” says his owner, Cody Reiss, who plays a graduate student in the film. Indeed, what Noochie lacks in intellect he makes up for in temperament: Getting the first-time actor to hit his marks required only dry cat food and a piece of twine. Plus, “he’s got very few boundaries, and if his boundaries are crossed, he’s not violent,” says Reiss. Noochie did, however, require two body doubles, BB and Evan, for the more technical scenes. Victor cast Noochie as Olga—the cat their character adopts while uneasily adapting to life after a sexual trauma—because of his “easygoing demeanor, which is very rare with cats,” Victor explains. Like most felines from the San Francisco Bay Area, Noochie is very open-minded and had no problems playing the opposite gender.

Creature, Die My Love

Creature, a Pyrenean shepherd, went full Meisner method to play the raucous family pet in Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love. Before the 8-year-old was trained to join Agility Team Canada and become a certified cadaver recovery canine, she’d earned the name Creature because her temperament could be “intense and crazy,” says her owner and trainer, Romy Dupal-Demers. It requires a lot of work to get a well-trained dog to tap into their youthful misbehavior in productive ways. Among the harder tricks for her to master was peeing like a boy on furniture and pulling the tablecloth off a table so that the plates and forks landed just so. For better or worse, the annoyingly pitched bark that helps drive postpartum mother Grace (played by Jennifer Lawrence) to the brink of psychosis came naturally to Creature. “Really, the role was meant for her,” says Dupal-Demers. Currently, Creature is shooting a project on a remote mountain in Calgary, Canada. No one is at liberty to discuss the role.

Bertha, Lurker

Unlike human child stars, young animal actors fare remarkably well later in life, both psychologically and professionally. Just look at Bertha, who’s been working since she was 8 months old. “She’s gentle and sweet, so she tends to be the sheep of choice,” says her trainer, Guin Dill, of Guin’s Movie Menagerie. Bertha, who often does commercials, has started exploring independent cinema. She plays a farm sheep not unlike herself in the film Lurker, about a gaunt clout fiend who ingratiates himself with his favorite musician, Oliver. For a music video filmed in a field, Oliver lip-synchs while holding Bertha; a group of indie assistants then fumble around to mount a camera on her back for a POV shot. While Bertha is generally low-maintenance—all she eats on set is hay—she does require five days of grooming before appearing on camera. “People just assume sheep are white and fluffy, but their wool is like Velcro,” says Dill. “We have to bathe them, and it takes that long for the wool to dry.”

Indy, Good Boy

Prior to starring in Good Boy, Indy had the basic training of a decently well-behaved pet. “He’s not a real actor,” says Ben Leonberg, the film’s director and cowriter. “He’s just my dog.” In other words, Indy is a nepo baby. But he really can act—in fact, he’s in every scene of the horror movie. Indy’s role was both straightforward and nuanced: His owner develops a lung disease and moves into his dead grandfather’s remote cabin, which is haunted by a sinister force that only Indy can sense. To get Indy to look curiously at the dark corners of a room, Leonberg and his wife/coproducer, Kari Fischer, would make bizarre sounds, like quacking, or silly gestures, like putting their shoes on their heads. “If you say a command he doesn’t know, he will give you this very steely look where it seems like the gears are turning,” Leonberg explains. One of the more difficult scenes to shoot featured fake blood, which Indy found delicious. For the most part, fame hasn’t gone to his head, though he’s taken to wearing bowties on the red carpet. And he’s developed a nonnegotiable working condition: absolutely no tennis balls around.

Moose, Luna, and Listo, Echo Valley

Rarely do fashion models successfully pivot to acting. But the three horses in Echo Valley—a drama about a widowed horse trainer (Julianne Moore) dragged into a crime by her drug-addicted daughter (Sydney Sweeney)—pulled off what many people can’t. Perhaps it’s because of their big personalities. Listo (far right), a white Andalusian who has appeared in Ralph Lauren holiday window displays, is “a real gentleman—he shares his food with the wild turkeys,” says the trio’s trainer, Cari Swanson. Luna (center), a black Hanoverian, is a total “diva—she will let you know that she is the center of attention.” (Bad Bunny recently sat atop her in promotional photos for his Most Wanted Tour.) Last but not least, there’s Moose, a yellow Palomino who’s “a very funny comedian,” often compared to the 1960s sitcom star Mister Ed. In one of Echo Valley’s more dramatic scenes, the horses are trapped in a barn that’s burning down, all three of them bucking and neighing. “They’re actors—they knew what we were going for,” says Swanson. “They know the word ‘Action’; they know the word ‘Cut.’ It’s more difficult to get the humans in sync.”

Tonic, Caught Stealing

If a cat’s tail “comes straight up and there’s a hook, that cat is confident,” explains animal trainer Melissa Millett. When Tonic, her Siberian Forest cat, flew from Toronto to New York to audition for Darren Aronofsky’s thriller Caught Stealing, “he walked into Aronofsky’s office like he was the king—tail straight.” (“Tonic is remarkable,” says the director. “He’s a spectacular creature.”) The feline had only two months to prepare to play Austin Butler’s sidekick, learning to limp on command and ride the New York City subway. But Tonic is a professional: He’s appeared in several horror movies and rides a tricycle in live performances. Accordingly, he has a long list of work demands: chicken on set (both plain and soaked in crab broth), his own trailer, and no petting unless he explicitly requests affection. He enjoyed the Caught Stealing shoot so much that he grew “a little sad” when it wrapped. To lift his spirits, Millett encouraged him to make a grand entrance at the film’s New York premiere. Tonic drove onto the red carpet in a remote-controlled children’s car wearing a custom leather jacket. “I wanted people to see that he’s brilliant.”

Producer: Andrew Dasco; Photo Assistant for Bing: Jonathan Broady; Photo Assistant for Jake: Dani Leal; Photo Assistant for Noochie and Bertha: Morganne Boulden; Photo Assistant for Creature: Caitlin Boyle; Photo Assistant for Moose, Luna, Listo, and Indy: Davis Fowlkes; Photo Assistant for Tonic: Zackery Hobler; retouching: The hand of God; Fashion Assistant for Jake: Sundarta Khalsa; Fashion assistant for Noochie and Bertha: Sage McKee; Fashion Assistant for Creature: Caitlin Boyle; Fashion assistant for Tonic: Riwa Ismail; Special Thanks to Nomad Studios.