Josh Peck will tell you: Every dog has its day. Best known for Nickelodeon’s “Drake & Josh” and Fox sitcom “Grandfathered”, as well as his TikTok and YouTube accounts, the former child star’s current project is the Disney+ TV series reboot of 1989’s “Turner & Hooch”.
Peck portrays the late Turner’s son Scott, an ambitious U.S. Marshal who gets saddled with a slobbering, four-legged, crime-solving partner named Hooch. As a result, his life gets turned upside down — in the best possible way. In retrospect, Peck admits it took years to find this part, one that checked off all the boxes for him.
“I’ve been lucky enough to work a fair amount in my life, this far, because I started so young,” Peck tells ET Canada. “This was an opportunity to honour where I came from. I’ve always made family television. But I had no desire to go back to it if it meant doing something that I had done before. This seemed like a way to elevate and challenge the thing that I love doing so much, which was, ‘How can I make something for the whole family, while still feeling like I am going in new territories I have never been?’” he explains.
“With ‘Turner & Hooch’, the broad physical comedy was there,” he continues. “The rom-com stuff. What was new for me was working with an animal, and also, the U.S. Marshall aspect of it. That really forced me to train, to learn this new skillset, and to get something I had never got to do before. It felt like it was long and coming, and finally the right thing for my introduction back to TV.”
Five 160-pound French Mastiffs play Hooch. That’s a lot of pooch. The inevitable question that seems to need answering is whether Peck considers himself a dog person.
“I was in the realm of a dog person. I grew up with dogs. I had one up until last year. This definitely rocketed me. It leveled me up as far as dog person goes. At first, understandably so, the French Mastiff s who are our Hooch, they are timid. They are not the kind of dog that you can easily win their favour,” Peck says.
“Our dogs made me work for it,” he adds. “Eventually, after a couple of months when the dogs were sprinting to see me when they walked on set, or when they’d listen to me when I’d ask them to look at me in the middle of a take if we needed to get the right head cock, it was such a moment of pride when I felt like I really won them over.”
There’s no bones about it, working with big dogs can get ruff. Peck’s canine co-stars never demand larger trailers — only more treats — but they certainly produce copious quantities of saliva that inevitably splatters everywhere.
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“People would ask me if I ever got used to it and I’d say, ‘Imagine if you worked at the morgue and whether the smell doesn’t get to you as much,”’ Peck explains. “Whenever we would have to have the dog lick my face, we would have to put on a layer of chicken baby food first, to make my face appetizing to them. Then it would lick it off in three licks. On those days I had to take two showers, I was like, ‘Wow. This can definitely be slightly gross at times.’”
“Turner & Hooch” offers plenty of comedy, heart and, yes, action. The pilot alone features explosions, gunplay, running, jumping and fights. Peck confesses the role turned out to be more physically demanding than he ever anticipated.
“It took me throughout the season to learn the nuance of how to do it in a way that saves your body,” Peck says with a laugh. “I remember the pilot. There was one moment where I ran, jumped down and put one knee down quickly. I was like, ‘Oh right. I’m 34. I don’t do this stuff on a continuous basis without some sort of orthopedic intervention.’ I learned how to spare my body slightly. Certainly, whether it’s being tackled by a 160-pound dog or running after a bad guy, sprinting at a full clip, take after take, it definitely was physically challenging.”
One fun detail about the series involves the episode titles. Each one pays homage to a spy/cop/action flick, while incorporating a dog pun. For example, “A Good Day to Dog Hard” obviously riffs off “Die Hard”. And there’s more to come.
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“For ‘In the Line of Fur,’ we are protecting a judge,” Peck says. “The newest episode, ‘Diamonds Are Furever’, is a nod to the movie ‘Heat’. We have some pretty epic jewel robbers. Then, we have one where I do a terrible impression of Liam Neeson. Our creator, Matt Nix, in addition to being super-talented, is also super-smart. He was like, ‘What’s a device I can use to wink at people, but also introduce a dog into it and flip it on its head?’”
“In the Line of Fur” also finds the romance between Scott and Erica (Vanessa Lengies), the head of the U.S. Marshall dog training program, heating up. The two continue to awkwardly interact, lovingly stare and fumble around each other — with some cute Freudian slips along the way.
“What’s good is when I read message boards or tweets, people are already frustrated with my character Scott,” notes Peck. “What will be exciting is that people want it so bad, but we do a good job at paying it off in a certain way throughout the season. The worst thing you can do is to have two characters together. So, we satisfy people without shooting ourselves in the foot. It’s fun. We watched it in Friends. We wanted Rachel and Ross to get together, get back together, for the whole show, and it only took 10 seasons.”
“Turner & Hooch” provides some much-needed laughter and fun during the pandemic. And for Peck, a husband and father, it adds more family-friendly fare that he’s proud to share with his son.
“People live really challenging lives,” Peck says. “Specifically doing ‘Turner & Hooch’, the fact that Canada allowed us to work during the pandemic and host us, we were really fortunate for that. A lot of people are making ends meet doing jobs that they don’t love.”
He concludes, “To be able to come home and find a reprieve in a bit of television, something that they can watch with their family and know they are not going to be left questioning their existence after or feeling bad… that they are going to walk away feeling great and not wondering what next week holds for them… is a really great gift.”
The first season of “Turner & Hooch” is streaming now on Disney+.
