George Lopez knows a thing or two about Chihuahuas. Lopez owns three of them - Chico, Trixie and Monty - and so providing the voice of a Chihuahua in Beverly Hills Chihuahua seemed like a natural fit. And as a Chihuahua owner, Lopez is fully aware of how the small dogs have turned into fashion accessories for some celebs. "Paris Hilton and different actors and actresses that carry them around... Yes, they're cute dogs. They're small, but they think that they can take anyone on. I mean, I've seen my dogs at a dog park where I have to put them in the car because they were going to beat up everyone in the park. You're like, 'Come on, what's going on? You're carrying them under your arm!' You're like, 'Are you crazy? What's going on?,'" said Lopez.
Lopez doesn't consider a dog to be a fashion statement and he definitely doesn't like the idea of dressing up pets, but he did have one hilarious story to share about animals wearing clothing while at the film's Los Angeles press junket. "A year ago…our friends have a brown Chihuahua that was a female, and we have our youngest Chihuahua, which is a male, and my wife and the other person's owner and the kids decided that it would be great if we had a Chihuahua wedding in the backyard. I tried to get out of it, but I came home at the wrong time," said Lopez. "They were just starting the wedding. So my smallest dog has a top hat on. They found a top hat and they found a bowtie and a tuxedo shirt. So there he is and they're holding them in their hand, and he's like, 'What the hell do I have on?' And then the other dog had a wedding dress on, and they were going to marry them. My daughter was doing the services but in the middle of the wedding, the mother-in-laws fought- the two dogs got in a fight in the backyard. The bride lost her dress in the middle of the ceremony and the father went missing and nobody could find him. And I thought, 'I've been to this wedding!'"
In Disney's family-friendly doggie film, a Beverly Hills Chihuahua named Chloe (voiced by Drew Barrymore) gets lost in Baja and has to rely on the help of a batch of two-legged and four-legged rescuers to escape from the bad guys. Lopez provides the voice of Papi, an incurably romantic Chihuahua who suffers from unrequited love. Papi's got a thing for high-class Chloe but she doesn't know he's alive until he comes to her aid.
The real dog who plays Papi in the film was rescued from a shelter by head trainer/animal coordinator Mike Alexander. Alexander saw a picture of 'Rusco' online and knew he was just the dog to play Papi. A Chihuahua-mix, Rusco's big ears and facial expressions caught Alexander's eye, and now the rescued dog lives at his trainer's 7-acre ranch.
Dog-lover Lopez never got to work with Rusco while he was doing the voice work for Papi. "Three months ago, he and I were together for the first time and we did a couple of promos for Disney. I gotta say, he was very good. I think he was a lot better than I was. He was more centered than I was. I was everywhere, and then he...Like he gave me a high-five on command. He was getting a manicure so he had his paws in water, and I was talking to him, and we were both sitting there with cucumbers over our eyes. You know, just kind of relaxing with cucumbers. And after they took the take, they were looking for the cucumber. He ate his cucumbers while they were resetting the camera," laughed Lopez.
"There's a lot of compelling stories in Hollywood of how people make it against all odds, but to be one day from being put down and then the next day you're on every billboard and you're the star of a movie is unbelievable. And it's unfortunate that he's a canine and really won't ever understand what that means," said Lopez. "But I think it's a metaphor for all of us. You know, I had kidney disease and I didn't know what my life was going to be like after my surgery, or even before, what the quality of life was going to be."
Lopez added, "In this movie, it's Disney and they always do movies that pull at your heartstring and this one's no different, and it was more of a romantic story than I imagined it to be when I was recording. You read the script initially, and then you go in there and you just read your pages. So when I saw the movie, I was impressed by the sweetness of Drew Barrymore's voice, how brilliant that is, and how sweet it is when she's talking on the train to the puppy and the mom. It's very Disney, and the fact that this movie had such a dynamic trailer with the big production number with the Chihuahuas in headdresses, that the New York Times called incredibly insulting on someone's image, and then at the same time…people that can't wait to see the movie. So when the New York Times says it's annoying, but yet there's a certain amount of people who can't wait. And on YouTube there were videos of how much they loved it. There was a YouTube video on how much they didn't like it. But what that did, it just created this great energy for the movie."
Even though he didn't spend time in the recording booth with Rusco, he did get to see the actress who voices his love interest. "You know what was great was in the beginning, I recorded for an hour and a half, and then we got that whole kind of romantic thing where I sang to Drew Barrymore through Plexiglas. And that's really the only way I should be close to Drew Barrymore, is through plastic, you know? And then when I started to record and they started to shoot in Mexico and they were bringing back footage and you got a chance to see what was going on, I went and asked them if I could re-record a lot of the stuff from the beginning, because I didn't have a reference point. And I said to Raja the director, 'Can I re-record this?' And he's like, 'It's fine.' And I'm like, 'To me, it seemed a little flat, so I wanted to re-do it and bump it up a little bit.' So it was great to be able to do that. I even saw him yesterday and said, 'Can I go in there and re-record stuff?' And he's like, 'No, there's 3,000 prints already," said Lopez, laughing.
