Project Hail Mary is previewing in UK cinemas this weekend ahead of its wider release next Thursday, and if you do go and see the sci-fi epic, we know you’ll fall in love with the alien Rocky. (If you’ve read the book, you’ll already be in love with Rocky, of course.)
But we have some devastating news for you. In the movie, you see a brief moment of Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) and Rocky doing karaoke, and it turns out that there was a longer karaoke scene between the pair that ended up being cut from the final edit.
“We did a bunch that didn’t make the movie, there’s a little bit of it. We did ‘tomato tomato’ [‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off’] which was fun because his voice computer would always put the emphasis on the wrong syllable,” Gosling told Digital Spy.
Sony Pictures
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“So when we’re fighting in a song about what the syllable was, you can just imagine how charming it was. It was fun, but it didn’t make the cut. We did a bunch of other songs too. We might have done ‘Ice Ice Baby’.”
Honestly, we’re tempted to take a star off our five-star rating now that we know Project Hail Mary robbed us of what would surely be the best movie scene of the year.
One of the reasons why Project Hail Mary works as well as it does is the chemistry between Grace and Rocky, which was elevated by the fact that the alien isn’t a CGI creation. Rocky was brought to life by puppeteer and on-set performer James Ortiz, who ended up voicing the role too.
“It’s the biggest gift you can give an actor, I think, to put [them] in a practical [set], put Rocky in front of them and then build a spacecraft around them,” Gosling reflected.
Sony Pictures
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“I don’t think anyone told our production designer that this thing didn’t have to actually go into space, everything was so credibly done that it just set the bar. Andy [Weir] set the bar in the book, but we all kind of followed in his footsteps, or we tried.”
Once you’ve seen Project Hail Mary, we think you’ll agree that they managed to meet that bar.
Project Hail Mary is previewing in UK cinemas on 14 and 15 March, ahead of its release in cinemas and IMAX on 19 March.
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Movies Editor, Digital Spy  Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor.  Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world.   After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.
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