Season 4 of Only Murders in the Building has featured a slew of exciting guest stars—Melissa McCarthy, Zach Galifianakis, Richard Kind, Eva Longoria, Paul Rudd, and Eugene Levy among them. But if you’re a dog person, you might be most captivated by the performance of Molly. The canine actor plays Gravey—a retired cadaver dog who helps Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short), and Mabel (Selena Gomez) solve the murder of Charles’ stunt double, Sazz Pataki (Jane Lynch).
As it turns out, Molly’s story is every bit as compelling as her character’s. She has spent time in prison, can safely pick up a bingo chip, and—perhaps most importantly from a dog’s perspective—is allowed to accompany her person to the bathroom. Here’s how she learned her amazing skills, and how she got her big break in showbiz.
The season finale of Only Murders in the Building will stream on Hulu starting October 29.
Molly’s “Animal Jobs”
Much like Gravey—who inspires her person, Howard (Michael Creighton), to start a podcast about animals with jobs called, yes, Animal Jobs—Molly is a senior dog with an interesting job. She is a service dog who assists Sari Sherman of Middletown, Connecticut.
Because of her existing repertoire of skills, acting is a breeze for Molly. William Berloni, who has worked with animals in theatre, film, and television since the 1970s and trained Molly on Only Murders, says she quickly acclimated to the sights, sounds, and smells on the set. “I give great credit,” he says, “to the people who train service dogs.” Molly was ready for almost anything—although, like many dogs, she did require a brief period of adjustment to realize that the boom mic overhead was not, in fact, a toy.
If you’re impressed with what Molly does on camera—walking in circles to indicate that she’s found a body, for example, or shaking a container of “ashes” (don’t worry—they’re dog-safe, made from crushed oatmeal) into the air with her mouth—you might be astounded by what she does on a regular day at Luther Ridge, the facility where she lives with Sherman. She can open doors and drawers. She can bark to call for help when Sherman needs it. She can pick up anything Sherman drops, even if it’s as small as a dime.
“I lose my cane, I drop anything, she’ll pick it up,” Sherman says of Molly. “She loves doing that. Coke-bottle tops. Don’t ask me how she does it. I’m playing bingo and a chip falls on the floor, she’s on it.”
ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING (Disney/Patrick Harbron)
From behind bars to in front of the camera
Molly was bred by Guiding Eyes for the Blind and trained by NEADS (formerly National Education for Assistance Dog Services) through the Prison Pup Program, in which inmates spend most of their days alongside puppies and train them. The puppies spend their weekends with “raisers” outside of the prison, making sure they’re properly socialized for their future careers.
Molly and Sherman bonded immediately. “Right away, from the moment I met her, it was amazing,” Sherman remembers. “Everywhere I went, she never once looked away. She must have known how badly I needed her.” Since then, they’ve been almost inseparable.
One of the only exceptions has been during Molly’s unexpected turn as a television star. She found her way to the screen through Berloni, who’s known Sherman for decades—among her many talents, Sherman has been an animal trainer, and Berloni worked with her on movies starting with 1989’s Everybody Wins, in which she helped with chickens and a baby lamb on set. When Berloni was looking for a dog to be on Little Voice on AppleTV+, he thought of Molly. Thus began her second career.
When this Only Murders role came about, it required a senior dog with a very specific set of qualities. As far as Bill was concerned, there was no way it could be anyone but Molly. “When we got the script,” Berloni says, “The senior dog part of it is hard enough—but then, there are no retired cadaver dogs or bomb dogs that I know that are trained to do films. So, obviously, Molly’s look, Molly’s training—it was very simple to give her different tasks to do, whether it was sniffing a trail or finding some clue that they needed. So she was the one.”
The dog’s welfare comes first
Using Molly in a TV show requires certain accommodations. For one thing, Sherman needs to be set up with a home health aide or assistant to make sure she’s taken care of during her dog’s temporary absence.
“The most she’s ever been gone is four days,” says Sherman, “which was like, ‘Ah, I miss my baby.’ But they’d send me pictures, and we’d keep in touch that way—and I’d know she was okay. And she’d come home, and it was like, ‘Hi, mom. Let’s get back to work.’”
It’s also important to recognize that Molly is a senior. While she is well-suited to learn the tasks she has to do on camera because of her service-dog training, she does get tired. Berloni takes his role as her advocate and protector seriously.
“We’re very careful in our preproduction talks,” Berloni says, “that there are limitations—whether it’s heat, whether it’s cold. We were very concerned that she’s a senior dog. She’s got three takes in her.”
Berloni says there were no issues for Molly on Only Murders—everyone respected her limitations—but that looking after a dog on a set takes constant vigilance. Berloni, who is also the Director of Animal Behavior for the Humane Society of New York, says one problem is the way animals are categorized in film and TV productions. “Animals are still considered ‘props’ on films and TV,” he says, “which I find very unfortunate. So we get our orders from the prop master. ‘Bill, we need a dog to do this,’ and we prepare the dog to do that. We show up, and ‘What do you mean the dog has to pick up a ball while gunshots are happening? Why weren’t we told about the gunshots?’ ‘Oh, we forgot.’” In these cases, he says, a responsible trainer has to be ready to draw a line and, if necessary, walk away.
“From day one as an animal lover,” Berloni says, “I recognized that no animal is going to come up to me and say, ‘Hey, I want to do this.’ As the trainer on a set, I am the one responsible for their welfare—and if you ignore that, then you’re really being cruel to them.”
What’s next for Molly?
Will Molly return for another season of Only Murders? Bill isn’t sure. “If they come back next season and say, ‘We want Molly back,’ I don’t know if I could provide her. She might be at a point in her life where she needs to rest and relax.”
But, no matter what, even if she is enjoying retirement, Molly will continue to have fans everywhere she goes. She loves the other residents at Luther Ridge—including Mr. Pickles, another dog she recently “married” with 55 guests in attendance.
Sherman describes the scene when she tells Molly—who is always locked in on her job, and won’t goof off unless given permission—that it’s okay to say hello to her neighbors. “Once I say it, she’s so happy. Her tail is wagging, and she’ll say hi to everybody. She has to sniff everybody.”
