“I’m a big animal lover, but I didn’t think we had the type of lifestyle to have animals. Then fourteen years ago, my wife was like, ‘I think Tess’ — my stepdaughter — ‘wants a dog.’ Well, we don’t have the lifestyle to keep animals. We’re always travelling. I don’t think that’s right. So she kept at it for a couple of weeks. Then one day she called me, and she’s like, ‘come over here, there’s this dog, just come and look at it, just look at it.’ I’m like, ‘I’m not going to get a dog. We can’t get a dog.’ ‘Just look at it.’ So I go, and there are all these crazy puppies in this thing they keep puppies in, that cage type thing that’s open at the top. There’s like twenty puppies running around in this playpen, and one little Dachshund is sitting in the middle of the pen looking at me. Looking straight at me! And dogs are jumping on his head, all around him, and he’s just looking at me. And my heart broke, and I picked him up and started kissing him, and I haven’t stopped for fourteen years. It was supposed to be my stepdaughter’s dog. I took Frankie everywhere with me. I took him to the boxing gym, and all my boxing friends made fun of him because he would sit outside the gym and howl, cry for me: ‘Oh look at Frankie, he wants his dad!’ So he went everywhere with me for the first year, and we thought it would be best if he had a companion, so we found Jonnie, who was returned a couple of times by people. People bought her, rescued her and then returned her because she’s a frickin barbarian. She’s like your dog — pees anywhere she wants, craps anywhere she wants, does, eats anything she wants, wherever she wants. But she’s also cute, and I love her. I just can’t take her with us because she’s a barbarian, and god knows what she’ll do on a plane. She’s been around for 13 years. And then there’s Cody, our cat, who we got from a rescue kitten thing, and he’s been with us for seven years and at times served as the inspiration for Lucifer. I’ve posted pictures of the way Cody loves me. Bloody pictures of my arm. I think we have a toxic relationship, Cody and I, to be honest with you. I think we enjoy fucking with each other. I know I enjoy fucking with him, and he always does stuff to fuck with me and then looks at me like … so I think he gets the same enjoyment. He’s a good guy. Those are our animals. We also had three rats at one time. One of them was absolutely amazing. Her name was Sammy. But she got mammary gland tumours, it was terrible, and we took her to the vet. The vet said, ‘you can do surgery’; I’m like, ‘Tracy it’s not going to happen. We can’t’. She started crying, ‘I love Sammy’, and I said ‘alright, we’ll do surgery!’ Eight hundred dollars later … but it only gave Sammy a couple more weeks. Sammy was great. Sammy would touch your lower lip with her paws and then kiss you. Is that grossing you out? I’m germ-phobic, but I still let it happen! It was just too cute. I’d take Sammy everywhere. Sammy would sit on my shoulder, and I’d walk with Sammy. Sammy was great. [Sam Smith: Rats are smart]. They’re smart. Sammy knew what was up.”
Mark Pellegrino, Dragon Con (Friday) 2021
“I do have devil jammies for Frankie, but he doesn’t like to wear them.”
Mark Pellegrino, Dragon Con (Friday) 2021
“I have a really quick Mark Pellegrino animal lover story that I would like to tell. To Mark: It’s one of my favourite memories of you. It was at the end of season twelve when we were out in the grey alternate universe—walking along a long, dusty road. It was all of us; we had like seventeen cast members on set. You’re in manacles, and we’re walking down this road. In between takes, we’re all standing around, and I look, and Mark’s over there in the middle of the road by himself, bent over doing something in the road. I’m like, what is he doing? He walks crouched over like this to the edge of the road. I’m like, ‘what are you doing?’ You stand up, and you have a leaf and a stick, and you’re like, ‘there was a caterpillar in the middle of the road, and I didn’t want it to get stepped on.'”
Samantha Smith, Dragon Con (Friday) 2021
“Hey, wait a minute, man. You’re going to fuck up my reputation!”
Mark Pellegrino, Dragon Con (Friday) 2021
