Ryan Gosling Says ‘Project Hail Mary’ Is The Kind Of Movie He Wants His Kids To Grow Up With

Every once in a while, a movie comes along and reminds you of one of our greatest capacities as human beings: hope. Project Hail Mary, based on Andy Weir’s bestselling novel of the same name, is one of those movies.

Sure, it’s a big, sweeping sci-fi story about space travel and the fate of the world. But at the same time, it manages to be incredibly intimate. It’s a story about an unlikely friendship. And sacrifice. And the dogma that we can do hard things when it matters most.

In the film, Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a science-teacher-turned-reluctant-astronaut who wakes up aboard a spacecraft with no memory and the dawning realization that the survival of the universe is in his hands.

The bookish crowd can be hard to please (I don’t make the rules), but this is the kind of adaptation you wish for, holding onto all of the truly beautiful things that made Weir’s novel so beloved in the first place. While many visions of the future default to bleakness, this one feels stubbornly committed to the idea that goodness is worth betting on.

I had the chance to chat with Gosling and Weir about Project Hail Mary ahead of the film’s premiere, and couldn’t help but notice our conversation kept orbiting an emotional core: Even when the world feels heavy, even when the odds seem astronomically stacked against us, people are capable of extraordinary things… especially when we do them together.

Scary Mommy: This movie is massive in scale — space, science, survival — but what really struck me was how intimate and human it feels. Ryan, how did you find the emotional center of someone who’s literally alone in space?

Ryan Gosling: Can you believe it all came out of [Weir’s] brain? I’m just like, how did it all come out of there? It’s an extraordinary journey, right? I mean, you go to another galaxy, you make an alien best friend, and you save the stars. It’s a journey like no other. And yet at the heart of it, it’s just so emotional. People have that experience when they read the book, but it’s been beautiful to watch these screenings, because people are just so emotional.

You can’t believe that you care so much for this rock alien … The magic trick of the movie is that you’ll die for him at the end. You’re like, ‘What?’ But you will. And it’s just beautiful storytelling, and it’s a hard-earned friendship. It’s hard for them to even be in the same room. They have different atmospheres. They have different languages. It’s just so much problem-solving, and everything is difficult. And that’s why it’s so powerful at the end, because you feel like they fought for it.

SM: Absolutely. We all ride for Rocky!

RG: Yes, we ride for Rocky. That’s cool.

SM: Andy, your stories — The Martian, this — are grounded in science, but they’re also deeply optimistic. In a world that currently feels *not* optimistic, what does writing hopeful science fiction mean for you?

Andy Weir: Well, it’s interesting because that’s not a thing I have to put effort into. I am an inherently optimistic person. So I’m just writing the world the way I see the world. I have a very high opinion of human nature.

It’s easy to hyper-focus on bad things that are going on because there are eight billion people on this planet — there’s always going to be some bad things going on. But the thing to remember is that the bad things are in the news because bad things are newsworthy. The billion or so good things that happen every day don’t get reported because they’re mundane. Somebody trips on a street corner, breaks their leg, five or six people gather around, make sure that he’s safe, get him some water, call an ambulance, call his family to see if he’s OK. That doesn’t make the news because that’s so overwhelmingly normal for humans to do that it’s not newsworthy.

So it’s easy to lose sight of how good we are as a people and how positive humanity truly is. It’s easy to lose track of that if you hyper-focus on the extreme examples where we’re not.

SM: Now I just love you even more. Thanks for that.

RG: Right?!

SM: There’s that moment where Grace looks at the little mementos the astronauts brought with them: these tiny objects that represent who they are, their essence. If you were leaving Earth tomorrow, what items would you bring to represent your humanity?

RG: I just wouldn’t go. (laughs) I wouldn’t be going to space tomorrow. I would be hiding somewhere as opposed to gathering mementos bravely and stoically.

AW: I would also opt not to go to space, but if I had to bring a memento, I don’t know, probably just pictures of my son, something like that.

RG: Yeah. What would you bring?

SM: Oh, God. It would probably be something with my kids. Something with my family, my pets. Pretty boring and basic…

RG: No, it’s the same! Same.

AW: See, there it is again. And for him, it’d be for your girls, right?

RG: Yeah.

AW: It’s the same for everybody. See, once again, people are good. The first thing all three of us thought of is our kids, other people. We thought about other people first, instinctively, just first thought out of our heads.

RG: I think that’s what’s so special about this film, and why people are having such an emotional connection to it … it’s like we’ve been so saturated with dystopia in future narratives for the last decade to the point where it feels almost inevitable at this point. Then you have Andy sort of reminding us through his work that human beings are always making the impossible possible. That’s kind of our thing. And he’s reminding us that just what we’re capable of and that the future isn’t something necessarily to be feared, but just rather figure it out.

SM: Love that. Well, you mentioned kids, and obviously we’re all parents. I’m curious, did becoming a parent change the way you think about these stories centered on survival and the future?

AW: For me, absolutely. It’s interesting because Project Hail Mary was written a long time ago. I wrote it before the pandemic even happened and before I was a father. And at the time I wrote it, I kind of empathized with Grace not wanting to sacrifice himself. I wouldn’t want to. It’s like that. But now that I’m a father, I would happily sacrifice myself to save Earth because my son is on Earth. So it’s amazing how much every single aspect of your worldview changes once you become a parent. And that was a real surprise to me.

RG: I mean, it’s really why I wanted to make the film. Andy gave me this opportunity. When I received the manuscript, it was at a time when movie theaters were shutting down and movie productions were shutting down. And it just was such a… I mean, we all know. So to receive this — it was like a ‘Hail Mary,’ because it’s almost an impossible film to make. If you think of everything that this movie has to do, and then to want to make it in that time, it was almost like receiving the canister from Rocky. We couldn’t meet in person, and we just were like, ‘How are we going to do this?’

But I want so much to have one of those core memory films for my family that I could go to the theater. Eva and I look for films like that, that we could go to with our kids. And there just aren’t many. There aren’t any E.Ts or Back to the Futures or those films that you remember where you were and who you were with and that sort of stay with you through your life. And I just am so grateful to Andy that I got it. I feel like we made one of those with this. I wanted that for my kids, and I want that for their generation — to have Andy’s perspective that you’re capable of so much more than you’re being told and you’re capable of even more than you think.

See Project Hail Mary when it hits theaters on March 20.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.