Sally Field's 2019 Arrest Led Her To Find An Adorable Life-Changing Friend

Sally Field is one star from the 1960s who is still working today, though it sounds like there are times when she just wants to be at home and share her life with a special someone. In this case, that special someone took the form of a cavapoo (which is a mix between a cavalier King Charles spaniel and a miniature or toy poodle) named Dash, who ended up changing her life and even influencing her career.

Field got Dash not long after she was arrested alongside Jane Fonda in Washington, D.C., in December 2019 — one of those celebrity arrests that you may have forgotten. Fonda was leading weekly climate change rallies at the U.S. Capitol at the time. Field joined her at one of the events, and she and 25 others were arrested for "crowding and obstructing or incommoding," according to CBS News. It was the end of a busy and seemingly very tiring year for Field. She had traveled to London to star in the play "All My Sons," then worked in a different country on a mini-series that she thought was awful, and finally got arrested in D.C. It was a lot. As Field put it in a conversation with Noah Wyle for Variety's "Actors on Actors," "I just wanted to go home [at the time]."

That was the mindset that led to her finding Dash. "I was lonely, and it was cold, and I was in D.C., and I just started looking at puppies," she said on "Today" in May 2026. She reached out to a breeder she'd found online just out of curiosity, and it turned out that one of the puppies, a black one, was still available. Field went for it, and it sounds like her life hasn't been the same since.

Early in 2020, not long after her Washington D.C. arrest, Sally Field picked up Dash when he was just eight weeks old. Only a few weeks after that, the Covid-19 pandemic essentially shut down much of the country, and the two of them were left alone together at that uncertain time. "I was in the pandemic shutdown with this little creature," Field explained to Noah Wyle on "Actors on Actors." She added, "I'd never had a connection with a creature other than my children. ... I never had a pet. Not really," she said. "Now I had this little thing, and it changed me. It changed me. He taught me."

Getting a dog was something that Field never thought she might do, considering how much she works. Even when Field's three sons had dogs when they were growing up, she told Wyle that she'd take care of them but didn't connect with them. So, building a relationship with Dash was something new.

Field's bond with her dog was part of why she took the role of Tova, an aquarium custodian dealing with grief who ends up forming a connection with an octopus named Marcellus in the Netflix series, "Remarkably Bright Creatures." It was her first movie role in three years, and as she told Parade, "I was very predisposed to wanting to do it because I had this little creature [Dash] come into my life in 2019. And this [movie] is about the profound connection that human beings have to creatures." It probably also helped that Tova wasn't a character focused on finding a romantic relationship with a man to fulfill her; proudly independent, Field refuses to take these types of acting roles.