‘She has a dog-like personality’: the trainer who taught First Cow’s leading lady how to act
Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow contains, by any yardstick, one of the most affecting, eye-catching debuts in recent cinema. It comes not from any of the seasoned bipedal cast, but from the actress in the “titular role”, to quote the much-memed line of Beanie Feldstein in Lady Bird.
Eve, now four years old but two when she shot this, is a sandy-coloured Jersey cow of singularly captivating screen presence, around whom this story of dairy poaching on the Oregon fur trail chiefly revolves. She’s hard to forget, thanks to the care Reichardt devotes to all of her scenes. But this is just as much thanks to her trainer, a 20-year veteran of animal handling for film and TV called Lauren Henry.
Henry and her husband, Roland Sonneburg, run Talented Animals from their ranch in the Oregon mountains, and have dozens of creatures at their disposal, including six dogs, several cats, various goats, and pigs or alpacas on demand. “We have some Northwest native type characters if productions need those,” Henry explains, “like a skunk, or an opossum or a raccoon or a crow.”
Henry covered Reese Witherspoon with frogs for Wild (2014), trained the pitbulls in Green Room (2015) to act vicious without hurting anybody, and got golden retriever puppies to perform yoga in the straight-to-DVD Air Buddies (2006). Their crow goes by the fabulous name Scholar, and can be spotted in First Cow perched on the shoulder of the late, great character actor René Auberjonois.
As well as Eve, who is firmly part of the family by now, they have Starsky, the registered quarter horse who made an indelible impression in his own titular role, as the star of Andrew Haigh’s superb Lean on Pete (2017).
When I Zoom to interview Henry about her work, it’s dazzlingly sunny in Oregon and late at night in London. I’m not quite expecting to be treated immediately to the sight of Eve contentedly nuzzling her trainer in the paddock outside their home. She drifts off-screen as we speak, but has a funny habit of sidling back into view just when we’re raving about her.
The eagle-eyed will notice that First Cow and Lean on Pete share an American distributor, A24, with whom Henry has a productive ongoing relationship. Both films were set and shot in different parts of Oregon, which made Talented Animals a natural port of call for their productions.
Casting was a cinch, because Reichardt and Haigh simply fell in love with the animal they wound up choosing. Haigh merely needed to look out of the car window, spotting Starsky on his drive in, to know he’d found Pete in a heartbeat. In Eve’s case, her breed was the closest Henry could find to the period-specific kind described in the script (a cow variant that no longer exists). Reichardt was especially taken with her large, soulful eyes and sweet expression, and what Henry calls her “dog-like personality”.
“Kelly,” she adds, “didn’t want a cow that was particularly large. Because she didn’t want to overpower the actors in the scenes, size-wise. And a lot of dairy breeds are quite tall.”
Henry is being kind here to Eve’s principal scene partner, the excellent John Magaro, who at 5’5” is slightly shorter than Tom Cruise. Their chemistry is everything. To develop the rapport we see on screen, it’s important that he can whisper in his co-star’s ear, as he regularly does. He was given instruction to milk her on camera, too. For the scene where she nuzzles him in front of her owner (Toby Jones) and almost blows their cover, Eve rehearsed it repeatedly with Magaro on her left side, but hardly batted an eyelid when, at the last minute, he was switched over to her right. Seeking him out, she only had eyes for Magaro.
It was Henry’s task to find Eve, bring her into the fold and train her for the shoot, a process which got off to an auspicious start. “Her previous owners knew that a couple of scenes would involve actually milking the cow, so I wanted to test that out and make sure she was comfortable with everything.
“I knew already that the name of the movie was First Cow. When I pulled up, the lady who had her said, ‘Oh, she’s gonna be a little anxious, because she’s used to being the first cow’ – in terms of the order of being milked. It was just perfect synchronicity: a done deal. I brought her home, kept the name Eve, and started training her for the specific behaviours in the movie.”
We only get fleeting glimpses of Eve in the film’s first half, before the film has introduced her to Magaro’s Cookie Figowitz. He spots her first on a raft, being shepherded downriver as the first cow ever to reach the Oregon Territory. This crucial master shot was one of the film’s most logistically complicated, and took weeks of planning.
“We had a lot of meetings about how to construct that raft”, says Henry, “so that it was stable and safe, and so Eve would enjoy being on it. We made a mock-up at our facility, and got her super comfortable with being on it, eating on it, and spending her time on there. When we were filming on the river, it was shallow enough that if the raft had tipped, she would have been able to stand and walk out. It was only about, I dunno, four feet deep. We had a rescue boat next to us with a diver, in case something were to happen.
“My husband Roland was actually in wardrobe, and he's on that raft with her. Sitting behind her, dressed as a Frenchman. Eve loves him. Knowing he was there, she just closed her eyes and chewed her cud and just took a nap on that little boat. It was towed upstream by another boat, and then it was released and was just going down with the current. Because of all that prep on everybody's part, it went flawlessly.”
Henry considers the demands of any production carefully before signing up, largely to make sure her animals aren’t placed under undue stress. If there are distances to travel, they break up the days so that an Eve or Starsky don’t have to be confined for too long in a moving trailer.
Their trailer sounds pretty bling, in fact. It’s a 16’ box van set up with air conditioning, heating, beds and toys. I’m not even sure Faye Dunaway gets that these days.
“For First Cow, Eve’s trailer was her dressing room. But she really didn't want to be in it, because she wanted to be where the people were. I generally have this rule, to leave the animals alone when they're working, because they have a full schedule, and any little bit of interaction they have will make them more tired, and then they won't want to interact with people on screen. Not the case with Eve. She got more and more energised the more attention she got – so I encouraged the crew to pet her, give her apples, do selfies, whatever.”
Diva antics, from the sound of things, were remarkably scarce. Rider demands were met in the form of treats between each take. Many of Eve’s scenes were night shoots in the middle of the woods, which she patiently endured without undue bafflement about what on Earth she was doing there.
“It may have been a bit, 'why are we up in the middle of the night?',” Henry admits. “There's one scene when she was done, and we'd done this big long dolly shot and everything. As we were walking back to the trailer, she just folded up her little knees and just decided to have a snooze. We all decided to sit down with her and let her take a nap before we finished the walk back.”
Henry talks about how her animals can seem eerily attuned to the demands of the storytelling. In the very, very [spoiler!] distressing finale of Lean on Pete, Starsky had to play dead. “When he's lying there on the ground, he took this deep breath and this exhale, and he stopped breathing for a few seconds. And we were all in tears on set. How did he get the intensity and the emotion of that scene, as Charlie [Plummer] is crying over him? Eve somehow also has that same ability. It’s like they've read the script.”
Henry is modest about her achievements, but has an animal science degree and levels of expertise in the field that could shame us all. She’s conducted peer-reviewed studies with vets at Oregon State University on nutrition and immunology for dogs, has patented various medicines, and studied psychology for marine animals, along with mastering the methods of training that can win gold at herding, dock jumping and dressage.
When she was nine years old, her grandpa predicted that she was going to train animals for film. “I was doing little shows in the neighbourhood with my dogs, my cat and cockatiel. My neighbours were so cute and patient, and came over to watch these little girls put on these little shows. Then I went to college, got a degree, put it in my back pocket and went off to train animals for film, just like Gramps said I would. The first show that I did was for the BBC [a 1999 children’s fantasy called The Magician’s House] and I slowly branched out from there.”
“One of the reasons I think we've done as well as we have is that we have a very holistic approach to our training. We're here to make good animal stories come to life on film, but in order for that to happen, the animals have to have really good lives. The ones that don't enjoy it, we wouldn't even put them in the situation to do it. You can just get that notion – this is the type of animal that wants to be the centre of attention. Our job then is to take the director's vision and translate it into something the animal can understand.”
Eve has lately come into Henry’s home to hang out, and co-starred in Roland’s reading of a little pandemic poem at the beginning of Lockdown 1. The dogs have been busy cavorting and having a whale of a time in this delightful pop video for OK Go. Starsky has been, in Henry’s estimation, “a very busy boy. This is a horse that never says no to anything.” Since Lean on Pete, he’s done a TNT show called The Librarians, a commercial for a grocery store chain, and played a police horse in a lottery advert.
The hope is that Eve’s screen career can continue to thrive in similar ways, once the pace post Covid, which has stalled productions for the last year, eventually picks up. “She demands it! She wants to be a part of whatever’s happening.”
In cinemas now, and on Mubi from July 9