‘Scottish Mussel’, a British movie featuring our tame otters

A British film starring Talulah Riley, Martin Compston, and Joe Thomas of In Betweeners fame, has come out on DVD.  It also features our tame otters. I travelled up to Dunoon in Scotland to help with the scenes that, in the story, entail an injured otter brought into a wildlife conservation centre set in a beautiful location outside Glasgow.

Belinda the Otter with Sophie and Daphne Neville

The romcom is written and directed by Talulah Riley who was keen to use our very energetic young male otter Rudi in a scene where the otter is released back into the wild.  To achieve this on film, without losing him altogether, was quite a feat but he enjoyed himself and the result looks endearing.

When one of the producers asked if I had worked on any other films featuring animals, I had to admit there have been quite a few. We once had a baboon in the studio and I became quite used to filming with trained elephants. I worked with a whole variety of exotic animals on the vet series ‘One by One’ from a pelican to a full grown leopard. In the mid 1980’s I was lucky enough to spend four months on Corfu making the first BBC adaptation of Gerald Durrell’s autobiography ‘My Family and Other Animals’ with Brian Blessed and a huge number of tortoises. As it happens, Rudi appeared in the second series of The Durrells, playing both the male and female otters.

To see more about what the otters have been up to, please go to Daphne Neville’s website here.

You can read about living with tame otters in my book ‘Funnily Enough’ available in the UK here in paperback or on Kindle here

There are more photographs of the otters here

The DVD, which will be released on 3rd October, is available for pre-order here

One of our hand-reared otters who stars in ‘Scottish Mussel’

Author: Sophie Neville

Writer and charity fundraiser View all posts by Sophie Neville