Project Hail Mary is out now, and we really liked it. There’s Ryan Gosling’s “instantly likeable” performance, “excellent pacing”, and “this year’s best character” in the alien character Rocky.
He’s been voiced by James Ortiz in the film, but there’s a moment where you hear none other than Meryl Streep as one of his potential voices.
How did the Devil Wears Prada and Don’t Look Up actor end up making a cameo? Well that’s exactly what directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller revealed to Entertainment Weekly.
Sony Pictures
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“When we were on set, we did a bunch of silly voices ourselves. We had people from the crew do voices just to make Ryan laugh and have the characters have something to react to,” Miller said, with Lord adding that they tried to think of voices that text-to-speech software might have.
“And then we [thought], wouldn’t it be fun to get Meryl Streep?” Miller continued.
“And Ryan just said, ‘She can do anything’, and that was perfect. So we’re like, Okay, well, now we’ve got to ask Meryl Streep.
“And so then you’re like, okay, Amy Pascal, our producing partner on the movie, had made movies with her, many movies, like The Post and other movies. So she had a relationship. So we’re like, Amy, you got to—”
20th Century Studios
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Lord said they rehearsed asking the actor if she would “by any chance want to play a rejected voice of an alien” in the mirror many times, before plucking up the courage to finally do it.
“You have never seen a group of filmmakers procrastinate longer”, Lord said. “And then she did, and she was wonderful.”
Miller said she was “thoughtful and playful” with her approach to the small cameo, and actually did “a million different versions” of the voice, constantly asking the directors for their thoughts as she went along.
Project Hail Mary is out in cinemas now.
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Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016. In his time, he’s covered a host of live events and interviewed celebrities big and small. A big fan of TV and movies both mainstream and obscure, Joe also enjoys video games and in particular PlayStation. Joe currently does not use Twitter, but he only ever used it to tell people to watch the film Help! I’m a Fish.