Audiences coming out of the horror prequel A Quiet Place: Day One have been singing the praises (though, in a silent fashion) of Lupita Nyong-o’s cat, Frodo. Most of the Quiet Place: Day One reviews have gone out of the way to credit the phenomenal feline performance, accepting the fact that dogs would be too loud and reactionary in the Quiet Place universe to survive very long. Not Frodo. This cat quickly figures out how to get by in the creature-laden world. And that’s because it wasn’t just one cat on the set of A Quiet Place: Day One. It was two.
The film’s director, Michael Sarnoski, stopped by CinemaBlend’s official podcast ReelBlend to dig into massive spoilers for the brand new horror movie. And while it seems like we spent a LOT of time talking about the cat performance… well, that’s because the cat is a significant part of A Quiet Place: Day One, and a big reason – for me – the movie works as well as it does. It was during this conversation that Sarnoski explained that he chose two cats to play Frodo, and that he knew very early on that he did not want to have to rely on a CG cat, capturing as much of the cat in camera as he could.
The Quiet Place team recruited from Birds and Animals UK, with Sarnoski saying they treated it as if they were casting a fellow actor. They landed on two cats, Nico and Schnitzel. And as Sarnoski explained about Schnitzel in particular:
He seemed wise. He seemed older than his years. He seemed very astute and sharp, but also kind of aloof in his own way. He seemed like he had an inner world going on. I kind of bought him as a New York Street cat. … They trained those cats for months beforehand, putting them in pools, getting them used to water, getting them used to being carried in a bag, walking on a leash, all of that stuff. And then also making the cats comfortable with Lupita and Joe. Joe and Lupita spent a lot of time with the cats outside of shooting, just to make it so they were at ease and could look comfortable and not like they were all, ‘Why am I sitting here? What's going on?’ Also, when you're doing something that a cat doesn't really want to do, which is like floating in a violin case in a flooded subway, they need to be surrounded by people that they sort of trust and feel safe around.
OK, so, Michael Sarnoski employed two cats to play Frodo in A Quiet Place: Day One, for as he explained to ReelBlend, you might get a day where one of the cats is tired or disgruntled. It happens to the best of us. Over on Schnitzel's Instagram page, however (and yes, Schnitzel the Cat has an IG account), we now see that there was a THIRD “cat” – Frida. Prepare for some movie magic:
There’s something about the floating cat head in that image that gives me the creeps. They should have found some way to include that wizardry in the actual plot of A Quiet Place: Day One. It’s scarier, on its own, then the stalking monsters that react to sounds. Did you know that fans of the Quiet Place saga actually have a funny nickname for the monsters?
So far, audiences have been supporting the prequel to John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place. By shifting the action to New York City, the series has jolted its box office returns, and possibly paved the way for A Quiet Place: Part 3. If Krasinski decides to return to the franchise after branching out with IF, I have two words of advice on how he can continue Sarnoski’s streak: “Four cats.”
