Project Hail Mary works because "very few people can give you the range" that Ryan Gosling does, say Lord and Miller: "What a lucky thing for us"

Ryan Gosling might not look like your typical elementary school science teacher, but Project Hail Mary directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller think there was no one better to play Ryland Grace, their new sci-fi movie's protagonist.

"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."

A former molecular biologist whose controversial ideas caused him to be shunned by the scientific community, Grace is pulled back into the fray when he's recruited to a secret government project to save the sun from a dangerous alien microbe using the very same theories. The project culminates with him being sent into space to visit the only star unaffected by the microbe but, when he wakes up aboard a spacecraft, he has no memory of how he got there or what he's meant to be doing.

"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."

Unlike other heroes of "lost in space" movies, like Interstellar's Coop, for example, Grace is not in a hurry to get home. He doesn't have a family or a partner waiting for him back on Earth that he's pining after, and he has no memories of his deceased crew so he doesn't feel much about their deaths other than your basic human empathy for lost lives. This makes his relationship with Rocky, an alien he encounters who's been tasked with a similar mission to Grace's, all the more poignant.

"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."

"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.

Project Hail Mary arrives in UK cinemas on March 19 and US theaters on March 20. For more, check out our Project Hail Mary review, or get up to speed with the other biggest upcoming movies on the way in 2026.