HOLLYWOOD -- It will be a cold day in hell before Cuba Gooding Jr. forgets the dog days of winter he spent in Alberta last year.

Gooding spent most of last February and March in Canmore, Banff and the Kananaskis area filming the Disney family comedy Snow Dogs, which opens Friday.

"I have never been so cold in my life. I was wearing parkas over ski suits over sweaters and long johns just to keep warm.

"Eventually I got tired of looking like a doughboy so I'd take off one or two layers then I'd get paranoid about getting frost bite because my fingers would get numb," recalls Gooding.

In Snow Dogs, Gooding plays Ted Brooks, a Miami dentist who inherits a team of Alaska sled dogs.

It takes some nasty encounters with the huskies before Brooks is finally able to bond with his wily canines.

"We had three teams of huskies at any given time on set and each dog had its own trainer. The trainer's job was to get their dog subdued. They are so hyper. All they want to do is play."

'GENUINE ROUGH HOUSING'

There was one game Gooding dreaded. When Brooks first encounters the dogs, they attack him, pulling apart his ankle-length parka.

"We had 50 of those red coats. Before I ever got into one of those coats the trainers had hidden packets of meat in the training ones.

"The dogs were taught to play find-the-meat. They loved the game. Whenever they'd see me in a red coat, they'd freak out and rush me. It was all very playful, but genuine rough housing."

Gooding says he had football padding underneath his coats, but still managed to get nipped on the butt a couple of times.

He was never afraid of his fury co-stars just a bit apprehensive.

"In 1993, the year before I got married, I had a pair of Great Danes.

"The female had 11 puppies that I helped deliver. I raised them all for four months, so I was used to being mobbed by a pack of canines."

Gooding says his wife, Sara, made him give up his dogs.

"She replaced them with two kids which amounts to the same degree of pandemonium because dogs can't talk back.

"I did Snow Dogs for my kids. Every time a family film comes out it's an event for us. We go as a family.

"This is the kind of movie I would want to take my family to. It's so zany."

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One of the zanier sequences has Gooding being thrown from his dog sled and tumbling down a mountainside. "It took us three weeks to film that sequence. We filmed some of it in on a ski hill in Alberta and the rest of it in British Columbia."

Gooding says his sled was being pulled by a snowmobile when he was ejected from it.

"The very first day of sled training our instructor stressed that if we found ourselves falling we were not to let go of the sled. We had to let the dogs drag us until they stopped, because if the sled was suddenly lighter it could plow into them and hurt them."

Gooding makes no apologies for the slapstick nature of his performance in Snow Dogs.

"I'm a very expressive actor, just watch my face. It's my forte and I've had a lot of positive feedback from audiences because they feel I'm fearless in expressing emotion."

Gooding says he was grateful Brian Levant was the director of Snow Dogs, and not James L. Brooks or Cameron Crowe.

"James and Cameron are incredible directors, but they do way too many takes for me.

"Brian films so quickly that it helped me keep my energy so high."

Don't expect to see him in another screwball comedy soon.

"When I finished Snow Dogs, I went to Greece and Germany to shoot Boat Trip. It's another comedy with Roger Moore and Vivica A. Fox.

"With Rat Race, Snow Dogs and Boat Trip I've done enough comedies in a row, so I'm looking for something serious now."


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