Captain Marvel, the newest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, has been kicking up a ton of excitement, having been released just last month. But there’s some special excitement about Carol Danver’s feline (errr…Flerkin) companion Goose, who rocks the screen several times throughout the film. So who is Goose? Or better yet, what is Goose? And how did they get the cat in the film to pull all those crazy moves? Goose is a mystery in the comics and even on the film set, so let’s uncover what Goose is about on the page and behind the scenes of the movie! 

On The Page

In the Captain Marvel comic series, Goose actually goes by the name Chewie and plays an important role in the series by protecting Carol Danvers (Vers), battling with her and eventually connecting some of the dots in plot development in the most popular narratives of the Marvel Universe, such as The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy. But first, what is Chewie? Well if you’ve seen the movie or have read the comics, you know Chewie is simply not a cat, but a Flerkin.

Well what’s a Flerkin? It’s an alien from Earth-58163 that takes the form of a housecat. They’re known to be rare, and lay eggs to reproduce. Flerkins have great battle skills as they’re able to unleash tentacles and fangs from their mouth. This is only possible because they also function as pocket dimensions, allowing endless things to be stored inside of them. Sounds pretty cool, right?

Chewie is dedicated to protecting Captain Marvel, whether that be guarding her New York apartment or working alongside her, battling the enemy.

On The Big Screen

In the movie, Chewie is renamed to Goose, but all her other characteristics are the same. Goose is a Flerkin, joining Carol and Nick Fury on their journey to battle the Kree and keep the Tesseract (the power source of the energy-core) safe. Now Goose plays an essential role throughout the movie but especially in the end in the mysterious post-credits scene, which sets things up for the next story in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

If you’ve seen the movie, you know Goose appears in a lot of scenes and does a lot of things that you’d expect to be difficult for a cat actor to pull off. At first, they casted Reggie, an orange tabby, as the sole cat actor for Goose. “After looking at the script and seeing the work required, we all decided it would be good to add a couple more cats to the team,” said Ursula Brauner, whose company, Animals for Hollywood, provides and trains nonhuman actors for films. They then hired Archie, Gonzo and Rizzo to play Goose in the film as well. “Reggie was our all-around go-to cat — he’s seen in most of the film,” Brauner said and Gonzo was used mostly for scenes where Goose was being held. Archie and Rizzo were used in random scenes throughout the film. 

The shocking truth is that despite having four cats on set, 80% of the scenes with Goose are actually CGI. As VFX technician Chris Townsend told Huffington Post, “There are about over 100 shots of the cat in the film, 70 or 80 of them are CG.” The directors had intentions to use the real cats for the majority of the film but found it difficult to work with cat divas. “There are things that the cat didn’t want to do. Sometimes they’d be in the cockpit of the plane, and Ben Mendelsohn’s character would be sitting there in a big leather coat. The leather would creak and the cat would freak out on Sam Jackson’s lap. So there was an awful lot of replacement of the cat throughout the film” explained Townsend.

But CGI wasn’t a problem at all. It was reported that even the co-directors of the film afterwards couldn’t tell if the shot had a real cat or a CGI one. Apparently nowadays it’s almost always the right decision to go with CGI when depicting animals on-screen, for humane reasons if nothing else.

So what do you think of Chewie/Goose? Would you like to have a housecat that’s secretly an alien? Tell us in the comments below! 

If you love Goose, check out these other movie star cats here!