When a Norwegian horror film takes home major acting awards, it is not unusual for the internet to take notice. When the lead performance came from a dog, the whole world pays attention. Indy, a four-year-old Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, has become arguably the most talked-about animal performer in recent film history after his role in the Norwegian horror film Good Boy earned him the equivalent of a Best Actor award at a major Scandinavian film festival.
For those of us who work with dogs professionally, the story behind Indy’s performance is far more interesting than the headlines suggest.
What Is the Good Boy Movie?
Good Boy is a Norwegian psychological horror film that follows a young woman who enters a relationship with a wealthy man — only to discover that he lives with a person he treats as a dog. The film is deliberately unsettling and uses its central dog actor to carry much of the film’s emotional weight. Indy, playing the role of Christian, appears in nearly every scene and is required to convey confusion, distress, submission, and a range of nuanced emotional states without a single spoken line.
The film generated significant controversy on release but earned widespread critical praise, particularly for the dog’s performance — which critics described as unnervingly convincing. For a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever to hold his own in a psychologically complex horror film, the training involved had to be exceptional.
The Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever: Not Your Average Film Dog
Most people associate film dogs with Golden Retrievers, Border Collies, or German Shepherds. The Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever — known as the Toller — is a less common choice, and for good reason. Tollers are high-energy, highly intelligent dogs originally bred to lure and retrieve waterfowl. They are responsive to training but also intensely sensitive and can be prone to anxiety if handled incorrectly.
Choosing a Toller for a demanding, emotionally complex role was either brave or brilliant — possibly both. Their intelligence makes them capable of learning elaborate behavioural sequences. Their sensitivity, properly channelled, allows them to read human emotional cues with remarkable precision. But those same traits mean that poor training methods would have produced the opposite result: a stressed, unpredictable dog who shuts down on set.
The fact that Indy performed consistently across a demanding film shoot says a great deal about the quality of the training programme behind him. If you are curious about how breed traits affect trainability, our guide to top dog breeds in South Africa covers how to match a dog’s natural drives to the right training approach.
How Dogs Are Trained for Film Work
Dog training for film is a specialised discipline that sits at the intersection of obedience, behaviour shaping, and what animal trainers call “approximation” — building complex behaviours from small, incremental steps.
Behaviour Chaining
A dog actor rarely learns a complete scene in one go. Trainers break down every required behaviour into small components, reinforce each one reliably, and then chain them into longer sequences. For a film like Good Boy, where Indy needed to move on all fours for extended periods, avoid eye contact on cue, or display submissive posturing, each of those behaviours would have been trained as a discrete, reinforced skill before ever being combined into a scene.
Positive Reinforcement Is Non-Negotiable
The professional animal training industry moved away from compulsion-based methods decades ago, and for good reason. A dog working under threat of correction learns to avoid punishment — and avoidance behaviour is the last thing you want on a film set where precision and enthusiasm are required. Dogs trained with positive reinforcement develop what trainers call “offered behaviour” — they actively try things, they recover quickly from mistakes, and they remain engaged under the pressure of lights, cameras, and crew.
Indy’s ability to perform in an environment as sensory-complex as a film production — multiple strangers, artificial lighting, repetitive takes, unfamiliar locations — is a direct result of positive reinforcement-based training and thorough socialisation.
The Role of Clicker Training
Most professional animal trainers use a marker signal — typically a clicker — to communicate to the dog the precise moment a correct behaviour occurs. This precision matters enormously when you are shaping subtle behaviours: a slight head tilt, a particular ear position, a specific gait. If you have ever wondered whether dog training clickers actually work, the answer from professional film trainers is an unambiguous yes. The clicker (or a verbal marker) is the foundation of virtually all high-level animal performance training.
Socialisation and Environmental Exposure
A dog who has only ever trained in one environment will struggle when taken to a film set. Professional film dogs undergo extensive exposure to novel environments, equipment, sounds, and people from an early age. This is essentially structured socialisation — the same process we recommend for every puppy owner. The difference is the scope and intensity. Our guide to socialising your puppy covers the fundamentals, but film dogs extend that exposure programme throughout their working lives.
What Indy’s Performance Tells Us About Animal Welfare on Set
What is notable about Indy’s performance is not just its quality — it is the fact that a dog performing at that level, under those conditions, shows every sign of a dog who is comfortable, engaged, and working willingly. Stress in dogs manifests in predictable ways: yawning, lip licking, avoidance, displacement behaviours. A dog performing under duress looks very different from one who is genuinely engaged with its handler and the task at hand.
The dog actor trainers on Good Boy have spoken about the extensive preparation involved and their commitment to ensuring Indy’s wellbeing throughout production. That commitment is what made the performance possible.
What This Means for Everyday Dog Owners
Most dog owners are not training their pets for film roles. But the principles that produced a Best Actor-worthy performance from a Toller are the same principles that produce a well-behaved, happy dog in a Cape Town suburb.
Consistency, positive reinforcement, proper socialisation, and understanding your individual dog’s temperament are not industry secrets — they are the foundation of good dog training at every level. The biggest difference between Indy and the average pet dog is not talent. It is the time, structure, and expertise invested in training from the start.
Common errors — inconsistent cues, punishment-based corrections, skipping socialisation windows — are the same mistakes that derail both pet dogs and working dogs. Our post on common dog training mistakes covers the ones we see most frequently.
The Bigger Picture for Animal Performers
Indy’s award shines a light on an often-overlooked discipline. Animal performers in movies represent the highest expression of what science-based training can achieve — complex, reliable behaviour performed under unpredictable conditions, by an animal who is clearly thriving. That is worth celebrating, both as a film achievement and as a demonstration of what ethical, skilled training looks like in practice.
