Back in 2020, “The Martian” author Andy Weir sent Ryan Gosling a manuscript that hadn’t yet been published, but which he hoped the actor would respond to. When Gosling read “Project Hail Mary,” the story of a science teacher tasked with saving the world and stranded in space with only a rock-like alien for company, he felt exactly the way Weir had hoped.
“It felt like this project had a knife in my ribs,” Gosling told me at a Q&A I moderated following a guild screening of the film. “When I put the book down, the knife was saying, ‘OK, now you’re going to call [Phil] Lord and [Chris] Miller, and you’re going to get them to direct this. Then you’re going to get [producer] Amy Pascal to help you, and then you’re going to try to put together the best team there is in the business.’ It just took me hostage.”
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Six years later, “Project Hail Mary” is one of the biggest critical and commercial hits of 2026 and Gosling is a frontrunner for a well-deserved Oscar nomination. It’s hard to think of many other films of this scale that are so entirely dependent on one actor to do all the heavy lifting. Gosling is in every scene of the 156-minute movie, and he’s called upon to play every note on the tonal scale in a performance that utilizes his razor-sharp comic timing before moving into emotionally devastating registers.
What makes the work all the more impressive is that Gosling has to do all of it without benefit of a scene partner; aside from some flashback scenes depicting his character back on earth, he spends the entire movie with only the alien “Rocky” to act opposite. Luckily, Lord and Miller dismissed the idea of creating Rocky as an entirely computer-generated figure and insisted on having an actor and puppeteer on set to play the alien.
“I don’t think anyone else would have done that,” he said. “It was definitely the much harder route, and this was already very difficult. But it was their first instinct, and it was exactly why I wanted to work with them. I just knew that it didn’t matter how hard it was going to be, they were going make these choices because they were right, and they appreciate that the obstacles are opportunities.”
Those obstacles were plentiful on the set, since the Rocky puppet was often breaking or malfunctioning. “It was like the ‘Jaws’ shark,” he said. “Sometimes just the finger would work.” Rocky was played by James Ortiz, an actor with extensive puppeteering experience who impressed Gosling at his initial audition. There was an immediate rapport, and when Ortiz left the audition Gosling called after him, “Bye, Rocky!”
The problem was that on set it was no longer just Ortiz and Gosling. “It was six puppeteers, dressed like ninjas, and me pretending I couldn’t see them,” he said. Luckily, like Lord and Miller, Ortiz also saw problems and mistakes as opportunities, which Gosling felt mirrored the subject of the film. “We’re all working together to figure out the problem, and it’s what the characters are going through. They’re trying to solve problems so that they can move on with their mission.”
One of Rocky’s most charming attributes, for example, came about because the puppet wasn’t working. “They couldn’t get the arm to turn around to give a thumbs up,” he said. “So we were just like, ‘Let’s go with it,’ and that’s why the puppet gives a thumbs down.” Which isn’t to say that the problem solving was all fun, or Gosling never got tired of the constant challenges.
“I had been acting for a long time on the film, and gone through a lot of incarnations of the character, and really felt like I had tried everything I could think of,” he said. “I had been in a placenta onesie. I looked like a space caveman. I acted like I was born. I acted like I didn’t know how to talk. I was a toddler. I was a man. And by the end of it, we got to this very expensive set, which was all these LED screens we had been waiting for to be built. We invested a lot of money in that, and it was very visually beautiful and fancy and high-tech. But I was just so tired of acting alone.”
Gosling went outside for some air, and saw Julia Roberts. “I’d never met her, and she sat down and talked to me,” he said. “She was talking about how much fun she was having on her set with Luca Guadagnino on ‘After the Hunt.’ She said, ‘You should come over,’ and I needed human interaction. So I went down to the set, and they were shooting a party scene, and they were all drinking and having fun, and they seemed like they were having a great time.”
When Gosling returned to the “Project Hail Mary” set, he told Lord and Miller he was tired of acting alone. “I said, ‘I want a friend, I want someone to act with,'” he said. “They were like, ‘OK, but what do we do?’ And I said, ‘I want to get a mop, and I want to make it into a person and talk to it.’ And they stopped everything on our fancy, expensive day, and crawled around the sets looking for tape and glasses, and a dress. And they helped me build this mop lady for me to do scenes with, who we called Moppy Ringwald.”
As Gosling sees it, the fact that Lord and Miller stopped everything to make that happen is emblematic of why the film worked. “What were supposed to be these great visual scenes with all these LEDs, it was just a mop and sunglasses, and they put it in the movie.” In addition to realizing how important that kind of spontaneity could be, Gosling learned something else as well. “If you’re having a problem and you can’t solve it, talk to Julia Roberts. That’s the big lesson here. She’ll solve it for you.”
“Project Hail Mary” is currently streaming on Prime Video.