Quiet Place: Day One’s Frodo the cat has stolen the spotlight

Audiences are discovering that A Quiet Place: Day One includes a cat named "Frodo" who survives an alien attack. Director Michael Sarnoski is now revealing why the feline is a crucial element of the new film.

A Quiet Place: Day One, a prequel to the 2018 and 2021 Quiet Place films, features Lupita Nyong'o as Samira, also known as Sam. She is a terminally ill patient from a hospice center on a field trip with other patients in New York City when aliens invade the bustling metropolis.

Similar to the first two Quiet Place films, the creatures in this installment are blind but extremely sensitive to sound, attacking anything that produces noise with ferocity.

Following the initial attack, Sam encounters Eric (Joseph Quinn), a British law student who pledges to assist her with a personal mission before they join other survivors evacuating New York.

Joining Sam and Eric on their perilous journey through the crumbling city is Sam’s support cat, Frodo—portrayed by two tuxedo cats, Nico and Schnitzel—who plays a pivotal role in the story.

Sarnoski, who co-wrote the storyline for A Quiet Place: Day One with original Quiet Place director and star John Krasinski, explained to The Hollywood Reporter that Frodo “grew naturally out of Sam’s character.” He envisioned the cat as a symbol of the life she had before her illness.

“A hospice patient isn’t necessarily aiming for survival during the end of the world, and this is a chance for her to reconnect with her life,” Sarnoski explained to THR.

“Frodo became an extension of that. I always imagined that back when Sam lived in the city, Frodo was a savvy street cat, and she started leaving out a bowl of milk for him, and he became her pet.”

Therefore, according to Sarnoski's statement to THR, Frodo “became the one thing she took with her when she left the city as her life neared its end. Frodo is a stand-in for her life that once existed. So when they return to the city together, they re-experience it together.”

“The initial reaction was, ‘Okay, we’re going to have a computer-generated cat. I guess we can pull that off.’ But then I said, ‘No, I really want to do all the cat stuff for real and not ever do a CG cat.’”