Life at Home

The Dog Nobody Wanted Just Stole a Billion-Dollar Movie

Peggy spent six months unadopted because of how she looks. Then she became Dogpool in the highest-grossing R-rated film ever made. Her story is an accidental argument against judging a shelter dog by its face.

By James Okafor, Rescue & Advocacy Writer

June 25, 2026 · 5 min read

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Here is a number to sit with: roughly $1.3 billion. That is the worldwide box office of Deadpool & Wolverine, which overtook 2019’s Joker to become the highest-grossing R-rated film ever released. And one of its breakout stars is a dog who spent the first six months of her life sitting in a shelter because people took one look at her face and walked on.

Meet Peggy. She is a Pug and Chinese Crested mix, a combination sometimes called a Pugese, which is to say she has a wrinkly face, a tongue that lolls permanently out one side, and a tuft of white hair where most dogs have a smooth head. She has never had a protein shake or set foot in a gym, though she does do her own stunts. She is also, by the only measure Hollywood actually counts, a genuine movie star. The gap between how Peggy was first judged and what she went on to do is the whole point of her story, and it is a sharper point than “aww, the ugly dog made good.”

A dog priced out of a home by her looks

Peggy was born the runt of her litter, and being the runt of a litter of unusual-looking dogs is a hard place to start. Her littermates were adopted. She waited.

“All the other pups had new homes but I imagine people looking at her saw nothing but a high maintenance dog and the possibility of health issues,” her eventual mom, Holly Middleton, told ParrotPrint. “We loved her the instant we laid eyes on her with her big brown eyes, little tuft of white hair, and her tongue lolling out to one side.”

The assumption that sidelined Peggy, that an odd face signals an expensive, fragile dog, is worth examining, because it is so often wrong. In Peggy’s case it was simply false. “Peggy is a completely healthy and happy dog, her tongue doesn’t cause her any issues, she can eat and drink with no problems, and other than having to wear jumpers for warmth in colder weather and sun cream in the summer she’s exactly the same as any other dog,” Middleton said. The thing that made her unadoptable to strangers turned out to be cosmetic. The dog underneath was, in every way that matters to a family, ordinary and wonderful.

From “ugliest” to unmissable

In late 2022, on a friend’s suggestion, Middleton entered Peggy in ParrotPrint’s Britain’s Ugliest Dog contest. Middleton thinks Peggy is beautiful and does not take the joke personally, but she understood the angle. Peggy won, and the win turned into a media tour, BBC Breakfast, ITV’s This Morning, BBC Radio Five Live, the lot.

Middleton has always been clear about why she let her dog become a punchline with a purpose. “We didn’t set out to get a quirky dog, an underdog,” she said. “I hope her win encourages people to overlook the little oddities of those dogs left on the shelf.”

That is the part that landed hardest with us. The contest framed Peggy as a curiosity. Middleton kept redirecting the attention back to the shelter, to every other “odd-looking” dog still waiting because nobody could see past a wonky ear or a flat face. A novelty title became, in her hands, an adoption pitch.

The role that wasn’t supposed to exist

Peggy’s screen career began as a footnote. Dogpool, the canine variant of Deadpool, was barely an idea when the film was being written.

“The reason why I was a huge proponent for her was because she feels like the animal manifestation of Wade Wilson,” Ryan Reynolds told Empire. “It was, just, like, many things during the writing process, a tiny little afterthought, and it grew. It was one of those things where you just keep listening to the movie, and Dogpool became a staple.”

The afterthought made the final cut and then some. In the film, Dogpool belongs to a Deadpool variant stranded in the Void, the story’s purgatory, and for all the chaos around her she is never in real danger; the script makes sure of it. Peggy, who trained for the part, walked the red carpet at the London premiere in her Dogpool costume and took the stage with the cast, where Reynolds introduced her with the kind of affection that does not fake well. “She won Ugliest Dog in Britain, but we’re not telling her that, because she’s a 10 in our hearts, isn’t she? We love her very, very much. She’s a big star.”

He was not wrong about the star part. A movie that grossed more than a billion dollars put a once-overlooked shelter runt in front of a global audience, and audiences adored her, lolling tongue and all.

The point Peggy’s face keeps making

It would be easy to file Peggy under feel-good celebrity trivia and move on. But her arc quietly indicts a habit most of us share, sorting dogs by how they photograph. The shelter visitors who passed her over were not cruel. They were doing what people do: reading a face as a forecast and guessing wrong.

The dogs who wait longest in shelters are very often the ones who lost the genetic lottery on looks, the seniors, the blocky-headed, the snaggle-toothed, the ones with a tongue that will not stay in. Peggy is now the most famous evidence available that the dog behind the unusual face is just a dog, ready to be somebody’s whole world, or, in her case, a billion people’s favorite scene. Middleton said it before any of the cameras arrived, and a record-breaking movie has now said it for her: look again at the dog everyone else left on the shelf.