Will Ferrell brought out an adorable fluffy friend named Sophie to hawk his very R-rated new comedy, “Strays,” at CinemaCon on Wednesday. The comic actor and the border terrier teamed up to portray Reggie, a dog who is abandoned by his deadbeat owner (Will Forte). But Ferrell made it clear who has top billing.
“My career is going to go on for a long time, but this is the peak for you,” Ferrell said, as the camera operator at the cavernous Colosseum kept cutting back to Sophie’s soulful eyes. If there’s a “Strays 3,” Ferrell joked, the 8-year-old Sophie would need to be recast. “That’s an eternity in dog years…and that’s not even Hollywood years,” he said.
Ferrell also joked that he did the voice work for his canine counterpart while Sophie “made sure that Reggie looked like a real dog, which she is.” He added one more put down for the focus-pulling Sophie. He noted that he had won Emmys and a Mark Twain Prize, while “you regularly shit on the sidewalk.”
As for “Strays,” the movie looks like an outrageous, barrier-pushing comedy — think “Homeward Bound” with drugs and f-bombs. The trailer features incredibly cute dogs tripping on mushrooms in the forest and doing bloody (unintentional) damage to the rabbits who live there. There’s also a bizarre Dennis Quaid cameo, with the actor looking on as one dog tries to save his puppy friend from the clutches of an eagle while they soar high above the treetops.
“That is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’m Dennis Quaid. And Dennis Quaid has seen some shit,” he says.
In addition to Ferrell and Forte, the cast includes Jamie Foxx,Isla Fisher,Randall Park,Josh Gad andSofia Vergara. “Strays”is scheduled to be released in the United States on June 9.
Universal Pictures showed the footage during its presentation at CinemaCon, an annual convention of movie theater owners, where it also showed footage from “Oppenheimer,” “Wicked” and its reboot of “The Exorcist.”
