Indy the Dog: The Story Behind Good Boy's Star

Who Is Indy the Dog?

Breed and background

Indy is a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, a dog actor best known for his role in the 2025 film Good Boy. He's not a rescue or a trained studio animal picked for the part — Indy is described as an 8-year-old Nova Scotia Tolling Retriever and Leonberg's real-life pet, acquired years before anyone thought to point a camera at him.

Tollers themselves are a distinctive breed: people came to realize there were many characteristics of Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retrievers that would make them an ideal fit for a career as a horror star — Tollers are an affectionate, intelligent, and highly energetic breed. They also have alert and expressive almond-shaped eyes, as well as a signature high-pitched bark that can sound like a scream — which, as it turns out, is exactly the kind of detail a horror director notices. If you're weighing whether a Toller-type temperament suits your household, our guide to family-friendly dog breeds is a useful starting point before you fall for the look alone.

Owner/trainer Ben Leonberg

Indy is owned by Ben Leonberg and Kari Fischer, with Leonberg first receiving Indy in 2017. Leonberg wears three hats here: owner, director, and — by his own account — an amateur when it came to formal animal training. Leonberg grew up with dogs, not training dogs specifically, but doing things like fetch and obedience, so he had a little background when it came to figuring out how to get a performance out of a dog. Fischer produced the film and was on set throughout, and by most accounts the couple's actual day-to-day relationship with Indy — walks, hikes, basic manners — is what made the whole project possible.

Indy's Big Role in Good Boy

The horror film's premise

The film follows Indy as he attempts to rescue his owner, a young man with a chronic lung disease, who is engulfed by a supernatural presence lurking in his late grandfather's rural home. Critics have been careful to note this isn't a gimmick stretched over 90 minutes for a laugh — the lead of the film is a copper-colored retriever named Indy who pads around an eerie house deep in the New Jersey woods investigating its mysterious creaks, shadows and smells; an ordinary dog without a whiff of Hollywood hokum, he doesn't do implausible stunts, but we're invested in the mindset of this mundane hero, his nose twitches as dramatic as an ingenue's gasp.

The film marks the feature-length directorial debut of Leonberg, who conceived the idea after re-watching Poltergeist and noting the horror trope of dogs sensing the presence of ghosts before humans, deciding to write a traditional haunted house film from the perspective of a dog.

How a real dog led a horror movie

This was not a quick shoot. Leonberg took over three years and 400 days of filming to complete the film, with actors coming in during the final stage of principal photography or providing voiceovers during post-production, while for the majority of the period filming took place on closed sets with only Leonberg and Fischer present. The reason wasn't perfectionism for its own sake — it was welfare. Part of the advantage of making a film for as long as they did is that they had the runway to film during the specific conditions best for Indy; he's got a thick double coat so it's almost never too cold for him, but summer isn't great for filming outside since he'd be panting, and cooler days without rabbits or birds around make it easier for him to focus.

There was no stand-in dog and no CGI. Instead of using CGI, the film stars the couple's own retriever Indy, alongside human actors, with principal photography — including only Leonberg, Fischer, and Indy to keep the set distraction-free — taking an eye-popping 400-plus days over the course of three years.

Awards and Recognition

Astra Awards Best Performance win

The headline moment came at the 2026 Astra Film Awards. At the ceremony on January 9, 2026, Indy won Best Performance in a Horror or Thriller. The scale of the upset is what made it news: Indy beat Alfie Williams for 28 Years Later, Ethan Hawke for Black Phone 2, Alison Brie for Together, Sally Hawkins for Bring Her Back, and Sophie Thatcher for Companion. Indy ultimately won the award, making history as the first animal to win a major film acting award.

Before Astra, Indy had already picked up other honors. At the Austin Film Critics Association in December 2025 he won a Special Award, and at the Boston Society of Film Critics that same month he won Best in Show for Best Animal Performance. And his very first honor came earlier still, at his film's festival debut: Good Boy was selected for the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival, where Indy took home the "Howl of Fame" award.

Leonberg accepted the Astra on Indy's behalf with a line that's since been quoted everywhere: "He's standing alongside performers who didn't even need to be bribed with treats," said director Ben Leonberg, who is also Indy's owner.

Media reaction

Outlets across the entertainment press leaned into the novelty without treating it as a punchline. Syfy covered the ceremony, quoting Leonberg's speech directly: "This award and incredible group of nominees reflects the freedom that horror gives performers and, in our case, trainers, to play, experiment, and to push the boundaries. This is a genre fueled by originality and reinvention and by audiences who are the most eager to see something new." Coverage elsewhere noted the historical weight of the category itself: while there are some dog-specific film honors, such as the Palm Dog Award at Cannes, canine performances are rarely honored on par with human actors — Indy's win marks a shift away from relegating dogs to novelty categories.

How Was Indy Trained for the Role?

Leonberg's training approach

Here's the part that surprises people: there wasn't really a training regimen in the conventional sense. As Leonberg has explained, it surprises a lot of people to learn that Indy only knows a handful of tricks and commands — his "performance" isn't created through conventional training. Instead, the toolkit was small and low-tech. Eliciting Indy's performance involved making silly noises, enticing him with treats, and utilizing basic obedience training — it also helped that his two favorite people were always around.

The camera did a lot of the heavy lifting that a trained animal actor might otherwise provide. Leonberg noticed early on that Indy has this really intense, unblinking stare, which, if you point the camera at him and then show the reverse of what he's looking at, lets the audience create the meaning after the fact — the audience does the horror movie math in their minds, and that was something Indy was uniquely qualified to do. What reads on-screen as dread was often something much more mundane: what looks like frightened barking or paralyzing fear onscreen is, in reality, Indy staring down a treat or a tennis ball just off camera that he really wants, which he got as soon as they "cut."

Challenges of filming with a dog lead

The biggest constraint wasn't Indy's temperament — it was his schedule. Director Ben Leonberg spent roughly three years filming Good Boy, working around Indy's natural limits; shooting days stayed short, scenes relied on carefully placed treats, and camera angles did much of the storytelling heavy lifting. Even getting a few seconds of usable footage could take enormous effort: a behind-the-scenes look highlighted the extraordinary steps the filmmakers took to get just eight seconds of footage with Indy, who had no formal movie training prior to the film. Leonberg and Fischer even stepped into scenes themselves rather than ask Indy to perform with strangers — Leonberg ended up acting with him as the human lead's body double for a decent part of the movie, because there's stuff Indy would only do with a member of his family.

Why Real Dog Performances Resonate

Part of the film's pull is simply that audiences know it's real. There's no uncanny CGI fur, no motion-capture dot suit — just a dog reacting to his own environment, filmed patiently over years. Leonberg has said Indy became his leading man precisely because audiences get on board with a canine protagonist so quickly; you often have to convince an audience that your hero is someone to root for, but if you open the movie with a cute dog, people care about him instantly.

Audience reaction online

That instant investment cuts both ways. Making Indy the star drew plenty of buzz following the film's SXSW debut, but putting a canine companion in on-screen peril has incited a mixed bag of audience reactions. Some viewers have leaned hard into protective concern for Indy's welfare rather than the plot itself — harm to dogs is a trigger for many viewers, particularly in horror movies, and people who will happily watch teenagers get slaughtered by the dozen will nope out at violence to a dog. That anxiety became part of the film's marketing conversation as much as its reviews, and it's a fair emotional response — anyone who has spent time thinking about a dog's temperament and comfort levels (our guide to calm, easygoing breeds touches on how much a dog's baseline personality shapes what kind of "work" suits them) will recognize why fans wanted reassurance before buying a ticket.