Gerard Butler Shares How Adopting His Dog Parallels Hiccup Training Toothless

Gerard Butler strongly relates to one character’s journey in the How to Train Your Dragon franchise, but it’s not his role of Stoick. 

The 55-year-old actor, who portrays the dragon-hating Viking leader in the new live-action installment of the franchise, is more of an animal lover like his onscreen son Hiccup (played by Mason Thames in the new film). In fact, he sees some strong similarities between Hiccup finding and training the dragon Toothless and his own relationship with his rescue dog Shushka. 

“This is actually the day I met Shuska, and we were in the middle of nowhere in Bulgaria and I found this stray dog who was pretty ill and just immediately fell in love with her,” he said on the Today show on Thursday, June 12, of a sweet photo he shared of himself holding Shuska after finding her while filming on location in Bulgaria. 

Butler said he had an “incredible connection” with Shuska when they first met, but added, “It was an untrained dog, maybe from a pack of hunting dogs that got left out there. So that story of Hiccup and Toothless feels very similar to me when we started bonding with this dog and learning a whole new language — hers, not mine — but a whole new language between us.”

How to Train Your Dragon follows Hiccup, the son of Butler’s Stoick, who has grown up in a society that hunts and kills dragons. But when he happens upon Toothless, an injured Night Fury dragon, he nurses the creature back to health, forming a close friendship with him that ends up changing his village forever. 

“I think that’s what’s great about this movie, everybody feels a connection from many different angles,” Butler, who also voiced Stoick in the franchise’s original animated films, added. “That’s great when you tell a story like that that’s affecting you in many ways and definitely reminds me of my relationship with my beloved Shuska.” 

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Butler can’t resist the opportunity to gush over his beloved dog. Back in 2019, he shared more details of the day he rescued Shuska. 

“I was shooting up in the mountains and we were at the bottom of this mountain and we found this stray dog,” he told Cineplex at the time. “We were in the middle of nowhere and she was starving, just a beautiful dog. Just so present, right in your face will just sit and look at you. And I thought, ‘What am I going to do, just leave her?’ ”

As for the pup’s unusual moniker, Butler shared that too came from the film set. 

“There was an AD on the movie, going, ‘Hey, Shuska, Shuska,’ and I thought, ‘That’s a great name for a dog,’ ” he recalled. “And she seems like a Shuska, but I’ve since found out that Shuska actually means nothing. It’s kind of like, ‘Hey there, hey there.’ So my dog is called ‘hey there.’ ”

In May, Butler shared a sweet pic with his pup on Instagram, writing, “8 years ago in Bulgaria, I came home with more than just a movie — I got Shushka. She’s still the real star.”