Piper Perabo and Manolo Cardona star in the kid-friendly dog-centric Disney movie Beverly Hills Chihuahua directed by Raja Gosnell and featuring the voices of Drew Barrymore, George Lopez, and Andy Garcia. Perabo plays Rachel, the niece of Viv (Jamie Lee Curtis) who's the wealthy owner of a pampered Beverly Hills Chihuahua named Chloe. Chloe enjoys exotic foods, wearing designer outfits, and taking trips to the salon, and when Viv has to go away on a business trip, she trusts Rachel to take care of Chloe's every little need. But Rachel messes up and the high-class pooch soon finds herself lost in Mexico. Rising Latin-American actor Cardona co-stars as Viv's gardener, Sam, the guy Rachel turns to for help in retrieving the missing Chihuahua.
Both Perabo and Cardona claim they're animal lovers, although neither currently has a pet. "I don’t have enough time, with my traveling. So as much as I would like one, I don’t really feel that it’s a responsible choice at this point," explained Perabo.
Perabo and Cardona don't have dogs at home, but they had plenty of them to deal with on the set. "I didn't realize that there would be more than one for each dog. You think there’s going to be as many dogs as there are characters, but like with Angel, the dog that plays Chloe, she can’t do everything. So there had to be the swimming Chloe and the jumping Chloe," revealed Perabo. "There were five different Chloes, even though there was one main one. There were even more dogs than you’re seeing on screen, all there together."
Cardona admitted he was amazed by what the trainers could get his four-legged co-stars to do. Asked to explain, Cardona said, "Papi’s jumps, maybe. That was amazing! You’d think he was jumping on a trampoline, but he’s not. He was jumping. There were a lot of things, like when a dog had to open a door with his mouth. I don’t know how they train them to do something like that."
Perabo said one scene was particularly tough for 'Chloe' to do: "Getting Chloe to put the food in my shoes took a long time because Chihuahuas don’t pick things up with their mouth. You don’t throw balls to Chihuahuas because they don’t use their mouth to move things around. So, to get her to pick something up, carry it across the room and put it in the right place, took a very long time."
It's always a bit tricky working with animals and kids, and that was true on the set of Beverly Hills Chihuahua. "You have to be very patient. Working with dogs, you never know what they’re going to do," said Cardona. "You have to be aware and you have to work for them. They’re the main characters. We’re just there to support them."
Dogs are well taken care of on movie sets, sometimes more so than the human actors. "On movie sets, they bring in the big tubes of air conditioning. Especially when we were shooting in all these different places, they would have to bring in these huge tubes. So Frank, the pug who’s the famous dog from Men in Black, would crawl inside the air conditioning tube. And one day Jamie Lee Curtis crawled inside with Frank. It was much more comfortable in there," laughed Perabo.
As for the trend of celebs and others who treat small dogs as fashion accessories, Cardona says he's totally against it. "I think everyone can do what they want with their lives, but especially these days, with how the world is, if you try to put a diamond color on a dog, for me, that says something very bad about the person."
"I agree with Manolo," said Perabo. "Obviously, everyone has a right to spend their money how they choose, and as long as you are intending to be loving, I can support it, although it wouldn’t be my choice for how to spend my money."
