Taron Egerton’s Dog Co-Star Was a ‘Nightmare’ on ‘Everybody Wants to F--- Me’ Set

Toronto International Film Festival premieres tend to bring out some of the best behind-the-scenes storytelling of the year, and Taron Egerton’s latest project delivered exactly that kind of moment. The actor’s new comedy-horror film, ‘Everybody Wants to F— Me,’ made its debut Friday night to a packed house, with Egerton and director Jonathan Schey sticking around afterward for a Q&A that quickly turned into a very specific complaint session.

The film itself follows Adam, an art gallery assistant played by Egerton who’s carefully built a virtue-signaling persona designed to help him sleep with as many women as possible. That carefully curated act collapses once he meets a mysterious woman played by Jessica Henwick, whose presence sends Adam down a path of emotional, and eventually horrifically physical, transformation, all while his beloved dog Lola waits for him back home.

It’s that same beloved on-screen dog who became the real star of the post-screening conversation. Speaking to the crowd, Egerton and Schey revealed that the film’s actual canine performer was, in their telling, a genuine nightmare to work with on set.

According to Schey, the dog simply refused to stay in place for scenes that required it to sit still, constantly moving out of position no matter how many takes the crew attempted. He credited the film’s editors with essentially rescuing the performance in post-production, joking that their work made the dog look far more disciplined than it ever actually was during filming.

Egerton didn’t hold back either, poking fun at just how basic the dog’s job should have been by comparison to everything else happening on set. Schey went a step further, noting that the same rough-coated Jack Russell terrier was reportedly also working on ‘Bridgerton’ and another unnamed project at the same time, which he suggested explained its distracted, wandering behavior between takes.

Summing up the experience, Schey didn’t mince words: “Total nightmare. A–hole of a dog!” It’s the kind of blunt, good-natured venting that clearly landed with the TIFF crowd, especially once Egerton brought Brad Pitt’s upcoming dog-centric film ‘Heart of the Beast’ into the conversation, joking that whatever smooth, cooperative experience Pitt may have had with his own canine costar was decidedly not what happened here.

Beyond the dog drama, the Q&A also gave Egerton space to reflect more seriously on his character. Asked how he managed to connect with someone as outwardly performative as Adam, Egerton explained that he never really felt like he’d fully found the character, largely because Adam himself hasn’t found who he actually is as a person.

He described Adam as a genuinely challenging role specifically because the character exists in a state of ongoing existential uncertainty, spending most of his time performing the version of himself he believes he’s supposed to be rather than doing the harder work of figuring out who he actually is underneath that performance.

Schey, for his part, described building the film’s plot as a rapid-fire sequence of increasingly chaotic complications, matching the way the story shifts tone from a cheeky romantic comedy into something closer to a body-horror creep show as Adam’s world unravels.