“John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum” features one of the coolest fight scenes in movie history when Sofia and Wick must battle their way out of a casbah with the help of Sofia’s highly lethal dogs. It’s a pretty amazing fight, especially when you take into account the fact that the dogs in the movie are actually performing their own stunts.
In order to achieve this level of perfection on screen, the dogs had to be trained by skilled professionals, but Berry also played a big part in getting the animals ready. The digital release of the film includes a featurette where Berry talks about her relationship to the animals, explaining that she “could command them just like the trainers could command them” due to working with them off camera:
“I would spend four days a week out there with the dogs — two, three hours a day — and I would just go through the drills with them, just like the trainers. As the trainers were learning who they were, I was learning who they were.”
Even Keanu Reeves recognized the unique relationship that Berry had with the faithful puppers. “Halle spent over eight months, on and off, working with the trainers,” he recalls. “To a point where, when I was training with her, the trainer said to me, ‘They treat her like a trainer.'”
But Berry still had time to have fun with the animals, as well. Along with their rigorous training schedule, she also said, “They’re ferocious-looking, and they’re doing some amazing stunts, but they’re also really sweet, so I get a certain amount of time to just love on them and play with them” — which, for both Berry and the dogs, sounds like a pretty good gig.