Ryan Gosling has never been shy about wanting to make people laugh. The problem, he says, is that not everyone has always let him.
The 45-year-old is the lead actor and producer of Project Hail Mary, a space adventure based on Andy Weir’s 2021 novel of the same name. In it, Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a school science teacher who wakes up on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there and the small matter of saving the world from sun-eating bacteria to attend to. It is dense with science, expansive in scale — and, Gosling insists, genuinely funny.
That last part hasn’t always been easy to pull off. “I’ve always struggled as an actor because I would want to bring humour to something,” describing moments on previous films where something spontaneously funny would happen on set and the director would call cut and move on. “They’d say, ‘oh that’s funny but let’s go again as those funny things don’t happen in life.'” Gosling disagreed. So partly, he says, he became a producer on this film to create an environment where comedy and drama could actually coexist. “Funny things happen in dramatic and sad situations,” he says simply.
Space has been a recurring obsession for Gosling he starred as Neil Armstrong in First Man in 2018 and is set to appear in the upcoming Star Wars: Starfighter. He describes the subject as something he keeps returning to precisely because it refuses to give up its mysteries. “I think I’ll make another movie and I’ll get it, but I never do so I just go back in and make another one from another angle,” he says. “It’s infinite and very mysterious.”
To handle the film’s considerable scientific content, Gosling surrounded himself with experts on set astronauts, lab technicians, molecular biologists and physicists including Professor Brian Cox. But trust is placed in the audience too, he says, which fits the film’s broader theme of “reminding us of what we’re capable of as human beings.” For Gosling, Project Hail Mary is a deliberate attempt to offer something different “an opportunity to pivot away from the dystopian narratives that we’ve been saturated in for the last decade.” He has been repeating a line in recent weeks that doubles as a personal manifesto: “Believe the future as something to not be feared, just to be figured out.”
The production team Gosling assembled is formidable. Screenwriter Drew Goddard previously adapted Weir’s The Martian, and the directing duo of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller responsible for The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse — were brought on board to balance the film’s scientific weight with commercial accessibility.
Reviews have been largely warm. Empire called it “witty, wise and preposterously entertaining” and Deadline declared it “a mission accomplished.” Variety was less convinced, finding it too generic and too close in spirit to Interstellar, while The Guardian acknowledged “moments of dullness and puppyish silliness” but credited Gosling’s effortless charm with keeping the whole thing watchable.
Much of the film rests on the relationship between Gosling’s character and Rocky — a half CGI, half puppet alien he teams up with to save the planet. Director Phil Lord put it plainly: “Ryan is the special effect — that’s the one thing we couldn’t fix in post.” His co-director Christopher Miller agreed, saying the entire film depends on the audience believing in and caring about that relationship. “I would die for that rock,” Miller said of the film’s emotional pay-off, crediting it entirely to Gosling’s performance. “He is a great emotional actor. He is also a great physical actor. He can do everything.”
