Meet Larry Madrid, Penguin Wrangler

• June 14, 2011, 4:00 PM ET

By Alexandra Cheney

Barry Wetcher

Larry Madrid on the set of “Mr. Popper’s Penguins”

There’s a certain amount of candor in Larry Madrid, the head animal trainer for the film “Mr. Popper’s Penguins,” a family comedy starring Jim Carrey. Madrid operates on two planes, what the penguins need, like the non-negotiable 45 degree soundstage, and what the penguins could possibly be trained to do, like swim in a kiddie pool.  That careful balance has kept Madrid working with everything from tigers in “Doctor Dolittle” to dalmatians in “102 Dalmatians.” Speakeasy talked with the penguin wrangler, who’s spent three decades working with animals, on how to relate to and train penguins.

You had eight penguins to play the role of six. Was that part of a contingency plan?
Basically you always get a few extra just in case. In the learning process, some are better than others. And so that just gives you more material to work with. Worst-case scenario if one got injured or sick we’d be able to replace it. But mostly it was to be able to have a huge repertoire to choose from. There were a lot of scenes where there was only one penguin working.

You’ve been doing this for 30 years. Did you do something different with penguins?
We only had six weeks of lead time, and we didn’t really feel like we had enough time. We were apprehensive, for the first three days I was surprised at how wild they were even though they were hand fed at zoo. I was like there is no way we can start training them. By the fourth day I did see signs and fifth day starting training. We spent a good part of the day seven days a week cleaning and feeding the penguins and starting to teach them training behaviors. It’s the same for dogs, cats, birds, whatever. It’s a formula we use.

Throughout shooting was there anything that was tough to get penguins to do?
They had written one scene where the penguins were going to swim in kiddie pool in living room. It was an unscripted idea they had to try to shoot and we tried and we got some penguins in the pool but they just didn’t really like it. So I had the final say and I said no.

How was Jim Carrey with the penguins?
We did “The Truman Show” and the “Pet Detective” with him. He’s really animal savvy. It doesn’t affect him. He is able to relate to them and he had fun with it.

How do you relate to penguins?
You’ve got to hang out with them. You see how they are and get into that mode. If you have a dog or cat, you meet them and hang out with them and then you interact with them. But it’s on a level where you are interacting with a bird that can swim in the water that doesn’t fly. They still have all the bird tendencies, like a chicken where they will hang out and be interested and you will walk over to them and they will turn around and run away. Penguins swim a lot, they go on land to breed but their natural habitat is in the water swimming. Their nature is to not get eaten. Their mentality is something is going to eat me, where is it coming from?

Once you were done with the penguins, what happened to them?
They went to the zoo, to as natural of a habitat as can be in a zoo.
For more on Larry Madrid, check out the Speakeasy column here.

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