A Quiet Place: Day One's Star Was More Terrified Of The Cat Than The Monsters

There's an old saying in Hollywood: never work with children or animals. "A Quiet Place: Day One" star Lupita Nyong'o had her own, more specific rule: never work with cats. "I've been terrified of cats my entire life," the actress admitted in an interview on CBS Mornings. "Terrified. I wouldn't even be in a room with a cat." And even as a cat lover, I can't say that her reasons are entirely wrong: "I just found them suspicious. They're like little lions. If they were any bigger they would eat us."

This created a conflict when Nyong'o read the script for "Day One." The main character, Samira, is in New York City and carting around her pet cat, Frodo, when suddenly Earth is attacked by alien monsters. Frodo is very much one of the stars of the show, but Nyong'o begged director Michael Sarnoski to change Sam's pet to be any other animal. "It was one of the things that was holding me back from saying yes [to the movie]," she told Hot Ones host Sean Evans, even though she otherwise loved the script. 

Nyong'o ultimately decided to face her fears, and in preparation for the movie underwent exposure therapy: "They hired someone to bring cats to my home, and the first day they just released cats in my presence [while] I stood on the other side of the room and asked questions about why they were doing what they were doing." (Those are difficult questions to answer since no one really knows why cats do the things that they do.) 

Eventually, Nyong'o worked her way up from being in the same room as cats to holding cats, but while "A Quiet Place: Day One" may have helped her to overcome her fears, it still wasn't the easiest acting experience.

"Early on, a lot of people assumed, 'Okay, it's a big movie, we'll CG the cat, and it will make everything a lot easier," director Michael Sarnoski told IndieWire. But while the monsters in the movie might be CGI, he was determined to keep it real with Frodo: "It was important to me to have a real cat that you could feel connected to." When Nyong'o tried to persuade Sarnoski to swap the cat for literally any other animal, he "so politely" told her, "It has to be a cat" (via AP News).

As is often the case with animal characters in movies, Frodo the cat was actually played by multiple actors. Two cats, Nico and Schnitzel, teamed up to portray the intrepid feline, and Nyong'o did give credit to her feline co-stars in an interview with the Radio Times. "Cats are very individualistic and very independent," she explained. "And so, what they were able to teach these cats to do was astounding." However, as she points out, cats are natural divas. They're difficult to train and easily spooked, so whenever a cat was on set they automatically became number one on the call sheet. "It was like, 'Quiet on set. Schnitzel is here!' And then everybody gets quiet — because you have to make it comfortable for a cat."

While cats seem to have a stubborn habit of looking everywhere except at the camera when you're trying to take a cute photo of them, Nyong'o and her human co-star Joseph Quinn had the opposite problem. Often they would finish a take where both of them were happy with their performances, only to be told, "The cat was looking at the camera. You have to do that again."

As annoying as Nico and Schnitzel's demands and limitations as actors might have been, Nyong'o got so into character that she ended up becoming a cat lover just like Samira. "I had to look like I owned a cat, and look like I cared, and look like I loved the cat," she told People magazine. "In the process of playing that pretend, I actually fell in love with the cats [...] There's something that melts your heart when they hold onto you. It was a bond that I had with them."

She grew to love them so much, in fact, that she ended up adopting a cat of her very own: Yoyo. After filming wrapped and she found herself "going through a hard time" in her real life, "I just had a little voice saying, 'Get a cat.'" She initially fostered Yoyo after visiting a few animal shelter, and explained on Instagram that "three days into it, I knew I could not give him up." She's now a self-declared "cat mom."

Nyong'o isn't the first actor to fall for an animal co-star. Will Smith grew so attached to his scene partner in "I Am Legend," a German Shepherd called Abbey, that he tried to adopt her after making the movie. Unfortunately for Will, Abbey already had a family. "Game of Thrones" star Sophie Turner had more luck when she successfully adopted Zunni, the Northern Inuit dog who portrayed her character's pet direwolf in the show. Perhaps the most long-term relationship, however, is between Sylvester Stallone and his turtles Cuff and Link, whom he adopted after their appearance in "Rocky." They later enjoyed cameos in "Rocky Balboa" and "Creed II," and as of May 2019 were still alive and enjoying their forties.