Why Hollywood is really interested in cats right now

Cats, call your agents. Top creatives are increasingly giving notoriously difficult-to-train pets more dramatic roles in live-action projects.

In the famous Netflix limited series by Steven Zaillian Ripley, a Maine Coon nicknamed Lucio was referred to as the “main character”. In the next issue of Paramount A Quiet place: first day, Lupita Nyong'o plays a woman struggling to escape an alien invasion with her tuxedo cat Frodo. Last fall, Disney's Wonders co-starred with Goose, a deadly and super-powered ginger cat. In Matthew Vaughn's spy comedy For Argywhich just started streaming on Apple TV+, Bryce Dallas Howard flees the assassins with his Scottish Fold Alfie.

This sequence is unusual and probably unprecedented. Dogs get starring roles in live-action movies all the time. Cats play a leading role in Animated movies all the time. But live-action cats are a whole different ball of yarn. Sometimes a film will feature a cat in the forefront (like the 1965 Disney film). This damn cat and the 2013 Coen brothers comedy-drama Inside Llewyn Davis), but it is rare. That's partly because cats have long had a reputation for ruining shots and testing even the most patient filmmakers (a perhaps unfair reputation, as we'll explain later). Cats have therefore largely been treated more as accessories than as characters; relegated to brief appearances for specific effect – a scare, a laugh or as a character prop. When a hero is called into action, his cat stays on the couch. Until recently.

In a first version of For Argy, Vaughn says his novelist Elly (Howard) also left her cat at home before embarking on an adventure with super-spy Aidan (Sam Rockwell). “Then I saw a Taylor Swift documentary where she had her cat in a pack and I remember thinking that was a crazy image,” Vaughn recalled while speaking to The Hollywood Reporter. “I thought seeing the three of them have an adventure together would be fantastic. I was nervous about it being a cat, because cats aren't exactly the easiest animals to train. Yet by the time the film was released, Aflie was the focus of the marketing campaign.

Zaillian was also hesitant to give a cat such a large role in his adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley. “I had written the cat into the scripts, and I did it with some trepidation,” said the Oscar winner, who reprized the role of Lucio twice before finding the king majestic and judgmental. “I had the idea that the only witnesses to Tom's crimes would be animals who couldn't testify and people who might be uncomfortable testifying. The cat, of course, was the trickiest. Owners would bring cats into the office and think you would want them to do tricks. But what we wanted was a cat that could be really relaxed and comfortable around people and cameras.

And in the next Peaceful place prequel, writer-director Michael Sarnoski (who previously directed Nicolas Cage's animal-centric film Pig) also gave an important role to the cat. The film's cat wrestler, Jo Vaughan (who also worked on Wonders), says Day one might be the best cat performance she's ever seen in a film due to Frodo's relationship with the human characters in the story, combined with exciting action sequences.

But what is driving this sudden rise in feline representation?

Although there is no single clear reason, several likely factors come into play.

Firstly, cats are arguably in the zeitgeist right now – for whatever reason governs such things. Vaughn mentioned Swift, who posed on the cover of Time magazine in December as “Person of the Year” with her cat Benjamin Button. And a video game about a cat, Wanderbecame one of the hottest titles last year and is being made into a feature film.

Another factor could be that Instagram and TikTok have become rather useful brand ambassadors for the species, with cat videos promoting a wide range of feline expressions (one such cat video inspired Vaughn to add a scene In For Argy where Alfie attacks Bryan Cranston). And even though cats have a reputation for always seeming distant and impassive, a recent study found that they actually have 276 distinct facial expressions (Can Vin Diesel say the same?).

“Cats are more expressive than people tend to give them credit for and I learned a lot from looking through the lens while creating. [Argylle]” says Vaughn. “There are times when people say, 'Well, that photo is obviously CG and looks fake,' and I'm like, 'No, no, that was real.' I was amazed at how emotional a cat is. CG was used, he adds, when a shot was otherwise impossible. “We obviously couldn’t throw a cat off a building.”

And that's a third factor: CG animation has become both affordable and compelling enough to depict more naturalistic pets. The technology can enhance a cat's performance during static scenes, or fully animate it during action scenes (see last year's Netflix drama Fall of the House of Usherwho took the game of hellcat in the episode “The Black Cat” to a level beyond what was possible in the Pet Sematist movies).

“It's so easy now to do whatever you want with a cat or a dog, because it could be done seamlessly with CG and no one would ever know,” notes Zaillian (although in Ripleythe filmmaker got everything he needed from King without CG).

Yet even with the help of digital technology, working with cats can be like herding cats. A unique chat scene in Game Of Thrones became one of the most difficult HBO epics to make (“That cat wouldn't do anything,” co-executive producer Bryan Cogman said in the book Fire can't kill a dragon, “we never had the vaccine”). While the first cat Vaughn hired was fired because he found his behavior a little scary (“I'm a dog person,” he admits), Vaughn had better luck choosing his daughters' cat Chip . But at one point, the cat ran away from the set, which was “in the middle of nowhere” and – as he remarked to a reporter during the film's press tour – “everyone was freaking out “.

All of this brings us to the fourth and final reason why cats might be given more screen time: improved training. Professional training of cats for film has evolved significantly in recent years, says cat trainer Vaughan (not to be confused with For Argy director Vaughn). Vaughan typically spends 12 to 14 weeks preparing a cat for a film and always hires at least two very similar cats for a role (in case one of the cats isn't in the mood to film a scene).

“Training cats is hard,” she says. “But once they're practicing and working, and once they understand the concept, it gets easier and easier. I think a lot of [cats’ reputation] Maybe it comes from people coming in with cats on set that aren't necessarily trained, and so people have slightly bad experiences.

A common mistake, she says, is when filmmakers place an unprepared cat on a set and start trying to film almost immediately. On Matt Reeves The Batman, there's a scene where Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz) comes home to her apartment and several cats are milling about. Vaughan asked the cats to hang out in the apartment for a week before filming. “We got them used to the whole environment, so when it came time to [shoot]they were so comfortable that I literally didn’t even need to be in sight,” she said.

“The biggest mistake people make is assuming that cats aren't capable of [films]“, adds Vaughan. “Everyone does things with their dog. People don't usually do much with their cats, so most people say, “My cat would never do that” – that's their assumption because they base it on their own experiences. So they assume no cat will do it.

Cat tropes in cinema

For decades, cats in movies were mainly used to briefly fulfill a few tropes:

Fear of jumping cats: It's in horror movies that cats jump during a tense scene, surprising the nervous heroes and the audience, just before the killer acts. The trope might originate from 1977 Extraterrestrialwhere Jonesy brought her orange cat energy to several scenes in Ridley Scott's horror masterpiece, and Sigourney Weaver became the original badass cat mom, risking her life to save Jonesy in the film's climax (in the following, Alienswriter-director James Cameron sidelined Jonesy with the line: “And you, you little bastard, stay here”).

Single cats accessory: Pet cats are often briefly shown to indicate that someone lives a solitary life (as if living alone with a cat is a bad thing). Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's I even spelled it out: “I'm like Cat here, a nameless slob.” We belong to no one and no one belongs to us. In reality, there are only 3 cat owners percentage more likely be single than dog owners, so this stereotype isn't really true. The other part of this trope is that lonely cat owners tend to be female while dog owners are male – a stereotype that persists in films today (Would John Wick have you also worked with a cat? Discuss). There is a bit of statistical reality behind this: 64% of cat owners are women. But 60% of dog owners are also women. So you could say that pet owners overall are more likely to be women, and that women are almost as likely to be cat owners as they are to be dog owners.

Demon Cats: These are generally the most important cat roles, as they are villains who lead the action; an idea that dates back to the witch panic of the 16th century. Filmmakers also tend to be less nervous about killing a cat than killing a dog (“Never kill the dog” is a cliché of screenwriting rules, which says nothing about cats).