Erstwhile Gilmore Girl
Lauren Graham didn’t only have to contend with the chance of Steve Carell cracking
her up on the set of the forthcoming Evan
Almighty — she also had to share screen time with some unusual animals.

“The amazing stuff with the animals was less what my
interaction was with them, but [just] watching these trainers get them kindly
and very simply to do what they wanted them to do,” she says. “Because I just
thought, ‘These giraffes have not been training to do Evan Almighty their whole lives. How do they know to bring him the hammer?’
You know, so much of the stuff is real that you see in the movie. So that was
really amazing. I mean, we weren’t sitting around petting the lions or
anything, but it was cool to watch them walk by. You’re sitting there drinking
coffee, and you just got strangely used to it.”

“The animal we dealt the most with was Toothy the alpaca (note: above alpaca is for illustrative purposes only),
who had… this huge underbite, and was really unattractive,” Graham continues. “And
I think we made the trainers mad because we called him Toothy and that’s not
his name. But the little boys who played our sons got really into Toothy as,
like, a mythical figure, even though he was right there. They’d be like, ‘Do
you think Toothy knows we’re rolling? Do you think Toothy knows we’re home?’ And
at dinner, and they’d be like, ‘What do you think Toothy’s eating for dinner?’”
Here Graham pauses for a laugh. “So he was the one that somehow, maybe became
of his unusual appearance, struck gold in our hearts.”