Every stage actor worth their salt knows that rehearsals are the bread and butter of their performances, but the movie industry does always have the luxury of setting the scene before filming begins. Project Hail Mary, however, had plenty of pre-production that allowed Ryan Gosling and his costar James Ortiz to dig deep into the central dynamic at the heart of the sci-fi adventure.
Based on Andy Weir’s bestselling novel, Project Hail Mary follows Ryland Grace (played by Gosling), a middle school science teacher who becomes — through a series of unfortunate events — the planet’s only hope of surviving a solar crisis. He is joined by Rocky (Ortiz), a rock-shaped alien lifeform known as an Eridian, and the two become unlikely allies in their critical mission. Over weeks of rehearsal (not to mention the actual production itself), Ortiz and Gosling developed a bond that shone onscreen even when the two actors could not physically see each other on set.
ScreenRant had the opportunity to interview Ortiz about his process for becoming Rocky in Project Hail Mary, which was an intricate dance even when he expected to be replaced by another voice actor through ADR. Ortiz shared the detail he found most fascinating about Gosling’s performance, and how it informed his own, and what he hopes to see in a potential sequel.
Finding The Voice (And Body) Of Project Hail Mary’s Resident Eridian
ScreenRant: You were not always planned to be the final voice of Rocky. Did your feeling of ownership over him grow over the course of your time on set? Did you ever realize it had to be you before you were officially asked?
James Ortiz: Never! Movie making is a business, and I knew that they would have to sell tickets. I have a healthy amount of theater credits, but I knew what I signed up for.
Of course, that didn’t mean that I wanted to half-ass it on set. And I don’t mean just vocally; I mean the entire character. I couldn’t separate the voice performance from the physical, since it’s all just acting for me. I’ve spent a long time as an actor, and I’ve acted through puppetry. I’ve always found that there’s something quite freeing about acting through an external object. I don’t have to worry about how I look, first of all. If [my vibe] communicates some persona, some strange professorial Brooklyn weirdo, that might get in the way of this character.
But no, I never really expected to be the voice, but I did really always want to go whole hog. And that was for the sake of Ryan [Gosling]. I knew that Ryan had a whole movie on his back. And by the way, he’s more than capable of handling this; he’s done it many times before. But I knew that it would be really unfair to him to have to also make up what Rocky is doing.
Ortiz was determined to make Gosling’s job as easy as possible, and in doing so, their partnership seems to have elevated the entire filming experience.
So, we had a phone call. I got cast, and then a couple of hours later, I got a phone call from this unknown number going, “Hi, it’s Ryan.” I had just done a chemistry read with him, so we had a lovely chat, and it was really cool. And in that chat, I went, “I know that you love improv,” because that was something we did in the audition. “I promise you we can improvise with Rocky.”
Puppetry is generally really technical and very choreographed, but I just said, “Whenever Rocky is on set with you, I just want him to be as fully realized as possible, so that you don’t have to guess anything.” Even when there were moments where we didn’t have enough space for all of his five legs, in some cases, we would take one leg off and add it later in VFX. That would just be one of the practical considerations when you’re trying to navigate the ball and the puppeteer’s hands. But when Ryan was on set, I would do my best to not do that, just so that he didn’t have to guess. That was important to me.
ScreenRant: What would you say is the greatest discovery you made through that improv process, or the way that it most impacted Project Hail Mary as a film?
James Ortiz: Oh, my gosh! The impact on the film might be too big a question for me, but I was just thinking about this today. When we first started, I asked for some rehearsal time with Ryan and the directors. Some of it was blocking out scenes, but I was also really curious about how we were going to work together. How were we going to do this thing?
And what we found out in these early rehearsals, way before we even had the set finished, we treated it like rehearsing a play. Honestly, most of the time, I would put the puppet down and play Rocky on the ground. I wouldn’t shove myself in the ball, but I would be where he would be, and that became the way that we started our day.
It would be the only time that Ryan and I, as actors, could see each other. Because when I’m in all my black and operating this character, most of the time, I couldn’t even see Ryan in the takes because I was always looking at a monitor that was showing me where the frame was. When you have an external body, you may not be able to feel where he is in the light. Like you can’t tell.
By acting outside the ball, as it were, Ortiz was able to discern details about Gosling’s interpretation of Grace that would have otherwise been invisible — and the reserve is equally true.
So, a lot of the improvisation was actually tiny bits of relationship building, and that was something I thought was really tender. I’ll put it this way: Rocky doesn’t exist in the story outside of his relationship to Grace. Rocky does not have scenes by himself, so I always asked Ryan, “How are you going to play this?” Because that would help me know how I’m going to respond. But he was very smart not to answer that, because I think he wanted to find out for himself.
When I read the book, Grace felt kind of misanthropic to me. He was a little distant and a little removed. But Ryan brought so much warmth and tenderness to him. One thing that moved me, because English is not Rocky’s first language, was how Ryan as Grace would just quietly listen and wait for Rocky to get his thoughts out. That was something that just happened on set sometimes because we couldn’t hear each other or whatever, but it happens in the movie all the time, because Ryan was adding that and making space. That was when I went, “Right, he’s a school teacher. He makes space for that with his students.”
ScreenRant: Rocky is primarily brought to life through practical effects and actual puppetry. How many Rocky puppets did you actually have made from the beginning to the end of filming?
James Ortiz: We had different ones that we would use for different things. When Rocky is rolling around in the ball, you can imagine that trying to operate five legs inside a moving ball is impossible.
There was some footage that came out online, where it’s a big plastic ball with handles that I was running around the set with and knocking into everything. When Rocky knocked into stuff, it really was happening, and I was saying my lines while that was happening. That ball was so loud because it was on a metal floor, so some of that sound got kept, and some of it had to be erased.
But that ball was one character in itself. That was sort of the proxy. Of course, whenever the ball would stop, we would stop everything, cut holes in the floor, and put a puppet Rocky there. Then we would do the scene. That was one of the puppets.
Just as Rocky’s characterization evolved through rehearsal, his physical manifestation also went through a little trial and error.
The plan was originally that we were going to use an animatronic the whole time, and the operating system for this puppet was called WALDO after the software that runs it. We were going to use this really elegant animatronic that was wonderful, but maybe a little stiff. The second you put him in a ball, he even got stiffer, so we actually only used him for a few select scenes. For example, when we’re in the don’t-go-crazy room, the mental health node, we would use the animatronic because that meant five puppeteers standing around him didn’t have to be erased from the frame. It would be a nightmare for the VFX team to erase that.
But the puppet we used the most was the Boon Rocky, named after a type of Japanese puppetry called Bunraku. That puppet was a hollow shell; a rod puppet. There were handles that came out of his lower back that I could use to basically control the amount of facial expressions that he had. Then the other puppeteers, of which there were sometimes five and other times seven, would operate the legs. We spent eight weeks rehearsing, and we spent a lot of time getting together and feeling how we were going to do this.
And in fact, I’ll say this for extra credit: we would all be focused on our own separate part of Rocky, and I would have to take a second between takes to marshal us back together so that we were all focusing on the whole. I would give everybody an emotional image in the middle of a scene. I would say, “In this moment, I would love for everybody to just think about how Rocky is heartbroken,” or whatever, and just let them do the exact same movement filled with something slightly different. Then I might play the opposite of that in the vocal performance. The movement of Rocky was always Rocky’s subtext, and what he said was not always accurate because there’s a computer and a translator, and it creates a disconnect.
ScreenRant: I know there’s been talk about potentially doing a Project Hail Mary sequel down the line. Is there anything you’d like to explore for Rocky that you haven’t gotten to yet?
James Ortiz: Wouldn’t that be so fun? Yeah, what happens next to them?
I did think about this. I thought it would be really interesting, because Rocky has been away from other Eridians for such a long time. I’d be curious about what the acclimation period would be like. He’s kind of turned into a person now, so how would they respond to him? What would that mean for him? That’s something that I’m always thinking about.
Project Hail Mary is currently streaming on Prime Video.
- Release Date
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March 15, 2026
- Runtime
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157 minutes
- Director
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Christopher Miller, Phil Lord
- Writers
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Drew Goddard, Andy Weir
- Producers
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Aditya Sood, Amy Pascal, Andy Weir, Christopher Miller, Phil Lord, Rachel O’Connor, Ryan Gosling
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