(Credits: Far Out / Gage Skidmore)
Sat 20 September 2025 15:30, UK
Over the years, Harrison Ford’s list of co-stars has included a bevvy of the greatest stars in Hollywood history. Well, and Shia LaBeouf, but let’s not hold that against him.
However, in 2020, he worked with his strangest co-star yet in a movie that had the potential to be a complete disaster from day one. After all, it’s not every day you make a film that consists almost entirely of two characters for the vast majority of the runtime, and there are even fewer instances where one of those characters is realised with computer-generated imagery.
Yet, this is exactly the scenario Ford found himself in while shooting Chris Sanders’ The Call of the Wild, the latest adaptation of a 1903 novel that had previously been brought to the screen in 1935 and 1972. For his portrayal of bearded frontiersman Jack Thornton, Ford had extremely big shoes to fill, because Clark Gable and Charlton Heston had played the grizzled outdoorsman who goes on a life-changing adventure with a Saint Bernard/Scotch Shepherd mix named Buck in those beloved big-screen incarnations of the story.
In Ford’s case, on top of the pressure of living up to those great performances, he also had to deal with a variable Gable and Heston could have never even considered. Buck, of course, wasn’t a real dog. Instead, he was played by former Cirque du Soleil star Terry Notary in a motion-capture suit, complete with funny-looking dots all over his leotard, and carbon fibre arm extensions that allowed him to walk, run, and play like one of our four-legged friends.
When Ford was first told this was how the production intended to realise Buck, who needed to accomplish a lot of adventuring in the movie that a real pooch simply couldn’t be relied upon for, he was understandably sceptical. “I hadn’t imagined quite how it was going to work,” Ford admitted with a chuckle when asked about the absurd scenario by Black Girl Nerds. “It seemed a little weird.”
However, the iconic Star Wars star soon found out that his furry co-star wasn’t being brought to life by any old stunt performer. Instead, Notary is Hollywood’s go-to guy for animal and creature performances, and his career has evolved over the last 25 years from being a movement coach to a stunt coordinator, and finally to the industry’s preeminent motion capture performer that isn’t named Andy Serkis.
Indeed, anyone who has seen a blockbuster movie in the last couple of decades has seen Notary’s work, even if they weren’t aware it was him. His characters include Rocket in the modern Planet of the Apes trilogy, King Kong in Kong: Skull Island, the terrifying ape Gordy in Nope, and Cull Obsidian in Avengers: Infinity War/Endgame.
All this is to say, Ford was in good hands (or paws) with Notary by his side. He called the California native “an accomplished actor and a gifted gymnast,” and credited him with developing “the skill to move like a dog and to help everyone organise their eye-line.” The best aspect of working with a fellow actor – even one pretending to be a doggo – was that Ford could “create an emotional relationship with the character that Terry was playing” that was completely different from the relationship he would have forged with a real dog.
All things considered, Ford’s co-star in The Call of the Wild may have been bizarre, but shooting the film wound up being a great experience for the veteran star. He found that having an actual actor to interact with instead of a tennis ball on a stick for the CGI guys to replace in post-production was invaluable, and it led him to quip, “Terry Notary does a great tennis ball! I mean, that was really great. Part of the pleasure of this thing.”
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