HE is starring in one of the biggest fantasy dramas on TV, has magazine cover looks, the ability to stay calm on a movie set and even a body double. Unfortunately, that body is covered in fur and before you get the wrong idea, we should point out that the star in question is Quigley, a nine-year-old Arctic wolf.
Quigley is the fanged star from hit television series Game Of Thrones, where he plays Jon Snow's "direwolf" Ghost – and the careful handling of the animal, dubbed the "Brad Pitt of wolves", is all down to Andrew Simpson, a Scot who is a world-leading expert in training wolves.
Fans of the HBO series have been left waiting to find out whether Ghost’s master Snow is dead after a cliffhanger finish to the last series. Now Simpson – who is also a huge fan of the show – has confirmed that Quigley will definitely be making an appearance in the first episode of season six, which will be screened in the UK on April 25.
The re-appearance of Ghost will raise speculation that the direwolf – a large ancestor of the modern wolf – will play a role in bringing Snow "back from the dead". But Simpson said he was unable to give any clues as he has been sworn to secrecy.
“As a fan is it is nice to watch it on TV when you don’t know what is going to happen,” he said. “When you are involved in it, you know a lot and it is very hard to keep it quiet. I do know what happens to Jon Snow – and it is a big cliffhanger, that is for sure.”
Simpson, 49, grew up on a 46,000-acre Highland estate north of Inverness, where he said his main entertainment was exploring the surrounding nature and animals.
“I was just that kid who always had a frog or a mouse in his pocket,” he said.
With a lifelong fascination with movies, he moved to Australia when he was 20 and managed to land a job working with dingoes on a film set. He then moved to Vancouver in Canada to work for a company before starting his own firm, Instinct Animals for Film, which is based near Calgary and specialises in training wolves.
Simpson said wolves are highly intelligent – but also the hardest animals to train for films.
“They are much smarter than dogs and they learn things very, very quickly,” he said.
“But the hard part is when you take that animal to a movie set – sometimes you are dealing with over 150 people in a single day and when you take an animal like that onto a movie set, everyone wants to come and see it.
“There is all that focus on one animal, so you have to have a particularly strong animal to handle all that pressure.”
He added: “Normally in the wild, the wolf lives by its instinct – and if it doesn’t trust something, it is just going to simply walk away. What we have to do as part of our job is give that animal so much confidence and trust in you and in itself that it overlooks everything its instinct is telling it to do, and it performs what is being asked of it.”
Simpson has a pack of 36 wolves at his ranch near Calgary, all of them trained to carry out moves for films such as snarling and "attacking" and jumping on people.
He said Quigley was chosen for the role of Ghost because he is very photogenic – but also has the right temperament to cope with the role.
“The first requirement is he had to be white to play Ghost,” he said. “We have many white ones here, but he is big and has a beautiful face. He also has the personality that he is very easy-going with everybody, there is never someone he doesn’t like, so he has the personality to put up with a lot of the craziness that happens on a movie set.
“His sister sometimes doubles for him for some stuff, but he is the main actor, he has got the magazine cover head shot. He is the Brad Pitt of wolves.”
Simpson has worked various major films, including supplying wolves for the Oscar-winning film The Revenant, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio.
He made the documentary Wolves Unleashed which follows Simpson and his team of animal trainers during a project in Siberia, which aimed to dispel both negative perceptions of how animals in movies are treated and the image of wolves.
“We did that project to show how we train animals, but also to show the other side that they are not the big bad wolf that hides in the forest,” he said.
“They are very intelligent and if you treat a wolf right and give it the respect it needs, you can get a lot out of them.”
Simpson also recently spent three years in China making Wolf Totem, a Chinese-language film directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, who is known for directing hits such as The Name Of The Rose and Seven Years In Tibet.
He is now working on making a follow-up documentary to Wolves Unleashed about his time in China, which he plans to fund by a crowdfunding campaign.
BUt while he occasionally makes it back home to visit family – his most recent trip was last month – he has yet to work on a film in Scotland with his animals.
“I am just waiting for the big call to go to Scotland to do a movie," he said. "It has got to happen sometime."
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