"And sure enough, they were, so I was walking up and down the aisles and saw this one dude, and he didn't belong there," Evans said. "I snagged him, and he's such a good dog."
That dog was Dodger, a boxer mix Evans officially adopted in April 2017. The pair subsequently became regular fixtures on the actor's social media, including appearances in matching shirts.
Speaking to PEOPLE in 2022, Evans described Dodger as loyal, fun and honest, before conceding that his assessment might not be entirely impartial.
"I'm probably biased, but I would say that Dodger is a cut above the average dog," he said.
Taylor Swift's adoption of Benjamin Button followed an even quicker courtship.
The ragdoll kitten appeared in the 2019 music video for "ME!", Swift's collaboration with Brendon Urie. Benjamin was part of an adoption programme that placed kittens in productions and commercials in the hope of finding them homes.
Before filming their scene, a handler asked Swift whether she wanted to hold him.
"She handed me this tiny cat, and he just starts purring," Swift later recalled during an Instagram Live. "I fell in love."
According to Swift, Urie immediately understood where the encounter was heading. Benjamin joined her existing cats Olivia Benson and Meredith Grey and later appeared with Swift in her TIME 2023 Person of the Year photo shoot.
Some performers take home props. Swift's happened to purr.
Sarah Jessica Parker, Yvette Nicole Brown and Tiffany Haddish found pets through production
For Sarah Jessica Parker, fiction and real life became unusually difficult to separate during the second season of And Just Like That....
On screen, Lotus played Shoe, the cat who entered Carrie Bradshaw's life. Away from the cameras, Lotus had come to the production through the Connecticut Humane Society after being rescued as a newborn alongside his siblings.
Parker revealed in August 2023 that the Parker-Broderick family had officially adopted him several months earlier, in April.
"If he looks familiar, that's because he is," Parker wrote while announcing the adoption. Lotus joined Rémy and Smila, two other cats the family had adopted in May 2022.
Yvette Nicole Brown's experience on the 2019 live-action Lady and the Tramp remake was less spontaneous. An animal trainer effectively played matchmaker.
Brown told PEOPLE that the trainer had been observing the cast rather than simply allowing anyone to choose one of the dogs.
"She watched you the entire run of the show, and at the end, she goes, 'I think I have your dog,'" Brown recalled.
The trainer's choice was Harley, a cocker spaniel who became Mister Harley Brown after the adoption.
"She was 100% right," Brown said. "Harley is my dog. I love him. He's a maniac, but I love him."
Tiffany Haddish encountered a similar situation while working on the 2016 comedy Keanu, whose plot rather conveniently revolves around an extremely desirable kitten.
The cat Haddish eventually adopted, Catonic, had been a rescue who was trained for the production and still needed a permanent home.
Haddish said an animal trainer noticed that Catonic repeatedly fell asleep when she held her. The actress already had two dogs and initially hesitated, but trainers offered to help the animals adjust to one another.
The arrangement apparently worked, although perhaps not entirely as nature intended.
"For the first year, the cat, I swear, she thought she was a dog," Haddish said in 2019.
Sophie Turner and Sylvester Stallone kept unusually literal pieces of screen history
Sophie Turner's adoption involved one of television's most recognisable fictional animals.
Zunni, a Northern Inuit dog, played Lady, the direwolf belonging to Turner's character Sansa Stark in HBO's Game of Thrones. After Lady's story ended on the series, Zunni needed to be rehomed.
Turner told Coventry Live in 2013 that she had always wanted a dog but that her parents had previously resisted the idea.
"We kind of fell in love with my character's dire wolf, Lady, on set," she said. "We knew Lady died [on the show], and they wanted to re-home her. My mum persuaded them to let us adopt her."
Sylvester Stallone's case stretches much further back — and involves considerably slower costars.
Cuff and Link appeared in the original Rocky in 1976 before Stallone adopted the turtles himself. More than four decades later, they returned to the franchise with cameos in 2018's Creed II.
That year, Stallone posted a photograph with what he called his "original buddies" and said the turtles were about 44 years old.
They were not Stallone's only real-life pet to make it into the Rocky films. His bull mastiff Butkus also appeared in the original movie and its 1979 sequel.
Brendan Fraser and Elizabeth Taylor formed their closest bonds with horses
Not every animal adoption from a film set can be managed with a carrier and a trip home.
Brendan Fraser met Pecas while making the 2015 miniseries Texas Rising in Mexico. Fraser noticed that the horse appeared to be getting picked on by the other animals.
He was careful, when describing the experience to GQ in 2018, not to pretend he could know exactly what Pecas was thinking.
"Without pretending that the animal is a human, he looked like he needed help," Fraser said. "Like, 'Get me out of here, man.'"
Fraser did precisely that. Pecas — whose name means Freckles in Spanish — was brought to Bedford, New York, where Fraser rented a stable near his home. The pair later went riding with neighbour Martha Stewart and her horses.
The relationship ultimately carried more weight than an unusual story from a film production. Speaking at the Red Sea Film Festival in 2024, Fraser said Pecas had died and described the horse as an important source of emotional support during a difficult period in his career.
"He saved … not my life, but he certainly saved an emotional part of me," Fraser said.
Elizabeth Taylor's relationship with King Charles offers an earlier version of the same phenomenon, stretching back to Hollywood's studio era.
Taylor was still a young teenager when she worked on the 1944 film National Velvet. She selected King Charles, a seven-year-old thoroughbred she already rode at her country club, to play The Pie.
According to Horse & Hound, King Charles responded particularly well to Taylor, who repeatedly asked Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer if she could keep him after production.
Studio chief Louis B. Mayer eventually agreed, giving the horse to Taylor as a 13th-birthday present.
Taylor would later joke that some of her "best leading men have been dogs and horses." In King Charles's case, the line was more than Hollywood wit: the animal who helped make one of her defining early films also became part of her life once the cameras stopped.
What these on-set adoptions had in common
The circumstances varied enormously. Evans found Dodger in a real shelter during a film scene. Swift met Benjamin because an adoption programme placed him in a music video. Parker's Lotus arrived through a humane society, while Brown's trainer spent an entire production deciding which dog might suit her.
Turner inherited her character's direwolf. Stallone kept turtles that would outlast decades of franchise history. Fraser and Taylor faced the considerably more complicated task of bringing horses into their lives.
What links the stories is that the animals were never simply accessories once the production ended. Several were rescues or animals awaiting new homes; others had already developed unusually strong bonds with their human costars.
Film and television sets are designed to manufacture convincing relationships on cue. These nine managed the less predictable version: the relationship survived after somebody called cut.
