“I had a dog named Jenny when I was growing up,” recalls Schilling. “When I’d come home, she was always so glad to see me. As a little girl, I trained her to walk across the room on her hind legs and my mother got so worried that I was hurting her back.

“For ‘The Lucky One,’ I was the one who had to be trained. The script called for me to go running with several dogs on a leash. That was probably the trickiest thing I had to do – learning how to run with all those dogs. I kept falling. Yeah, it was fun to run. I like to run. But the scene where we run into the pond – actually it was an accident.

"The dogs started treating me like I was like a part of the pack. They weren’t listening to me the way Rowdy listened to Zac. I was trying really hard to hang onto their leashes – but the dogs were all excited and I fell into the water. But it looked so good on film that they just kept it in the film.”