Ryan Gosling has played a lot of different characters over the years, but Project Hail Mary might ask more from him than any role he’s tackled before. The sci-fi film places him front and center for a story that swings between comedy, isolation, big science ideas, and emotional character moments.
According to directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, pulling that off requires an actor with serious range, and they say Gosling delivered exactly what the movie needed.
The upcoming sci-fi adventure centers on Ryland Grace, a former molecular biologist turned reluctant hero who wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of how he got there or why he’s in deep space. As the story unfolds, he slowly realizes he’s humanity’s last hope to stop an alien microbe that’s threatening the sun itself.
It’s a great story packed with humor, tension, and emotion, and Lord and Miller say Gosling was the perfect actor to carry all of it.
“He came to us with the material, so he was already a part of it, but it was part of what made it really a very easy yes,” Lord tells GamesRadar+. “Because he’s capable of so many different facets of a performance [and] this movie requires him to use all of them in a single picture.
“But we were huge fans of his from all his work, particularly Nice Guys, where he is hilarious, and we share an editor with that film, and we just knew we were going to get all the variations that were going to be necessary in a movie like this.”
Gosling’s performance carries a huge amount of the film. The story frequently puts Grace alone, relying on subtle reactions, humor, fear, and determination to keep the audience invested. According to the directors, very few actors could juggle all those tones in the same film the way Gosling does.
“Very few people can give you the range that he can give you in this movie,” Miller continues. “He makes you laugh, he makes you cry, sometimes in the same scene. You are with him in every moment, even when he’s not saying a word. You understand what he’s going through, and he can communicate so honestly, cinematically. What a lucky thing for us.”
Grace isn’t your typical space movie hero either. Unlike characters such as Cooper from Interstellar, he isn’t racing home to a family waiting on Earth. When he wakes up in space, he doesn’t even remember the crew that traveled with him. Emotionally, he starts the story pretty isolated.
That setup becomes important once he encounters Rocky, an alien traveler with a mission similar to his own. Their unlikely friendship ends up becoming the emotional heart of the film.
“A lot of space movies are about someone who’s a lonely spaceman, but this is about someone who’s lonely on Earth, and he goes to space and makes a friend who winds up being the greatest relationship of his life,” Lord explains. “And so it seems appropriate that you’re starting with someone who maybe doesn’t have that many connections on Earth.”
The filmmakers even designed the visual tone of the movie around that idea. Earth feels smaller and more distant, while space itself feels surprisingly open and welcoming.
“And that’s why we wanted space to feel warm and inviting and big and open and tall and Earth to be this widescreen, like, sliver of a slice that was a little bit cooler and more distant,” Miller adds.
Having seen Project Hail Mary, I can tell you it delives an awesome sci-fi story that’s just as much about friendship as it is about saving the universe.
Project Hail Mary hits theaters on March 20.
