The Cat Stays in the Picture

Cats don’t beg for attention — they command it. While dogs slobber and tail-wag their way across Hollywood, felines tend to make fewer appearances onscreen, but when they do, they often leave the most lasting impression.

Take Caught StealingDarren Aronofsky’s offbeat crime-comedy released during Labor Day weekend. Critics praised its Lower East Side grit and unpredictable energy, but it was a Siberian forest cat named Tonic who walked away with the most press. Cast as Bud — a scene-stealing feline with a lion’s mane and a tendency to bite — the cat plays a key role opposite Austin Butler and Zoë Kravitz, enduring shoot-outs, car chases and even a broken paw (don’t worry, the villain gets his comeuppance). Bud’s presence adds just the right amount of menace and mystery to the mayhem — and earns him a Pink Panther-style nod in the closing credits.

Offscreen, Tonic is just as unbothered. The 8-year-old stray, discovered in Ontario, recently appeared on the red carpet in a studded leather jacket, posing stoically in a cat-sized convertible. NPR dedicated a segment to him. Journalists melted. Tonic didn’t blink.

He’s just the latest in a long line of feline performers who’ve clawed their way into cinematic history — not as cuddly props, but as metaphorical mirrors, agents of chaos and unexpected emotional anchors.

On Apple TV’s DisclaimerCate Blanchett’s thriller miniseries, two cats drew outsized media attention, with THR even asking: “What’s with the cats?” Blanchett’s answer: They represent “organized chaos.”

Of course, no cat has burned itself into the public imagination quite like Orangey, the domestic shorthair tabby who played “Cat” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). As Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly pushes him out of a taxi in the rain, the abandonment hits hard — a metaphor for her inability to commit or care. Cat was her only tether to something real.

Two years later, a long-haired white Persian appeared in From Russia With Lovepurring from the lap of the Bond villain Blofeld. The image was so iconic, it became a franchise staple — and inspired a hairless parody, Mr. Bigglesworth, in the Austin Powers movies. (Mini Me had a kitten version, naturally.)

Sometimes cats aren’t even in the script. The scrawny stray Marlon Brando stroked in The Godfather was found on the Paramount lot the morning of the shoot. Brando, a devoted cat lover, made it part of Don Corleone’s most famous scene.

Christopher Walken, who once gifted an Abyssinian kitten to a reporter during an Interview magazine profile, has raised cats for decades. “My little beasties,” he calls them. In Nine Lives (2016), he plays a pet shop owner who helps turn Kevin Spacey into a cat named Mr. Fuzzypants. (Yes, that happened.)

And in the 1963 Czech cult classic The Cassandra Cata tabby exposes the truth by making people’s skin change color based on their moral character — red for love, orange or violet for hypocrisy. The exposed, of course, try to kill the cat.

The truth about cats and dogs in Hollywood is this: Dogs get more roles, more franchises, more box office. (Marley & Me, 101 Dalmatians, Dog.) But cats? They don’t need the work. They just need one perfect scene — and they never give it away cheaply.

This story appeared in the Oct. 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.