His Bark Gives the Chihuahua Bite

The country’s newest hunk, the DiCaprio of Chihuahuas, the pooch that belongs on the cover of Dog People magazine, does much more than pitch tacos in his latest Taco Bell commercial. He emotes with the skill of a Nicolas Cage or a Brando.

In this new episode, our hero stands en beret, drawn up to his full height of 6 inches, in dewy-eyed salute to gorditas. The anthem swells, the choral voices soar and the taco dog speaks in what is one of the great thespian voices of our generation: smooth and low, achingly mellow, indefinably continental. No wonder fan clubs are forming across the nation.

The taco dog’s voice belongs to Carlos Alazraqui--a stand-up comic, sometime actor and ace skydiver who now bills himself on posters for his comedy routine as “the voice behind the Taco Bell Chihuahua.”

Alazraqui is so busy these days that he hardly has time to answer his beeper. But it’s not because of the dog gig, which he says “just sort of happened.” Alazraqui made no special preparation for his audition, didn’t study the pitch dog’s character . . . he just went in and read cold for the part. And they liked him.

“The director told me, ‘Don’t do a high-pitched voice, ‘cause that’s what everybody else has been doing.’ So I used a variation of my own voice. Then I got a callback. They said, ‘Read it like you’re really cool, like you’re some 19-year-old dude who loves girls and tacos.’ ”

Alazraqui, 35, understands where the dog is coming from because his own family is from south of the border--Argentina. After growing up in Concord, Calif., he moved to San Francisco, where he did stand-up and voice-overs until he won the 1993 San Francisco International Stand-up Comedy Competition. Then he moved to L.A.

He has played several animals, including the title character in the Nickelodeon cartoon “Rocko’s Modern Life” and an animated groundhog on Fox TV. The groundhog moved, like the baby in “Ally McBeal,” by way of what’s called real-time animation. That is, the human actor wears a bodysuit equipped with sensors and reflective dots, all of which are picked up by computerized cameras.

Alazraqui also plays the lead in an upcoming Nickelodeon cartoon called “Catdog,” and, of course, there’s his gig as the Clark Gable of canines in a dozen already-filmed Taco Bell commercials. The next one, he says, shows taco dog conquering a drive-through.