Jeff Goldblum on Losing His Childhood Dog

In “Isle of Dogs” (2018) (in theaters April 13th), Jeff Goldblum is the voice of an alpha dog named Duke. When Variety caught up with him for a video interview, he told them a story from his childhood on how the family dog, a chocolate colored poodle named Ginger, nipped a kid on a bicycle one day. When he and his siblings came home from school, Ginger was gone and his mother told him and his siblings that they could not keep the dog because of what happened. She said Ginger was adopted by the chief of police and was going to live on his farm in upstate New York. Goldblum didn’t say when exactly he learned that was what he called code for “we killed the dog,” but it clearly was heartbreaking and he softly observes in the video that parents shouldn’t fib to their kids like that.

Why do parents do that though? Perhaps they think letting the children adjust to the absence of the dog before they find out will make it less of a blow. Obviously, it’s traumatic either way. Like many who have lost a beloved childhood pet (whether in the same way or not), Goldblum now has a dog of the same breed, an apricot colored poodle named Woody.

“Isle of Dogs” is a stop-motion animated film written, produced and directed by Wes Anderson. In the trivia section on IMDB for the film, it says that Goldblum recorded Duke’s lines over the phone from California when scheduling conflicts preventing him from traveling to England to be with the rest of the cast– and what a cast it is. They’ve got Bryan Cranston, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Scarlett Johansson and… well, here is a video where the dogs introduce themselves and tell you a little bit about their roles.