The Classic Hollywood Movie That Inspired Ryan Gosling's Project Hail Mary Performance [Exclusive]

Phil Lord's and Christopher Miller's new sci-fi film "Project Hail Mary," based on the novel by Andy Weir, stars Ryan Gosling as Dr. Ryland Grace, a once-promising scientist who lost his standing in the scientific community for promoting strange ideas about the unimportance of water in the development of life. Dr. Grace has found a new niche as a middle school school teacher, even if the position doesn't earn him a lot of money. At the start of the film, he's swept back into the scientific community by the government, as his skills are needed to handle an unusual crisis of astronomic proportions. It seems that the sun is being blotted out by a mysterious channel of energy, and Dr. Grace is enlisted to help solve the mystery.

Dr. Grace, who is not an astronaut, finds himself on a deep space mission to a distant star, as that distant star seems to have repelled a similar channel of energy. Dr. Grace will have to study it and send information back to Earth in a last-ditch hope of saving the planet. It's akin to a Hail Mary play, if you will. As you can see in the trailer, while studying the star, Dr. Grace will become friends with a traveling rock-like alien that also seeks to save its own planet.

Dr. Grace is ill-prepared for this mission. He has the scientific know-how, but isn't the type of bold hero or adventurer that the job requires. He's kind of out of his element, lost in a larger machine that he didn't construct. /Film's own Ethan Anderton recently got to sit down with Gosling to talk about Dr. Grace, and the actor revealed that he modeled his physical performance from Charlie Chaplin's in the celebrated 1936 film "Modern Times."

"Modern Times" is Charlie Chaplin's famous film about the struggles of the Great Depression. The film is most famous for its opening sequences wherein Chaplin's Tramp character is working at a large, automated facility full of levers, gears, and other ineffable machines. The Tramp falls into one of the machines, pulled powerlessly through its massive gears. Even in 1936, the modern world was being taken over by mechanical monstrosities. 

/Film asked Ryan Gosling about his preparations to play a character like Dr. Grace, and he confessed to watching Chaplin to give his character a "clumsiness" that matched the silent master. In Gosling's words:

"I prepared in a different way in the sense that I watched a lot of Chaplin movies, specifically 'Modern Times.' I was very inspired by the sequence where he's caught in the wheels of the machine. We really wanted to create sequences in space that you'd never seen before, where it was not space ballet. My name might be Grace, but it was anything but graceful. [...] But what was fun was some astronauts came to give us advice and they said [what we were doing was] actually a little more accurate, because they get a lot of bumps and bruises and it isn't space ballet." 

The term "space ballet" likely is a distant allusion to the way the starships moved in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." In that film, ships gracefully floated through space to the tune of Johann Strauss' "The Blue Danube" waltz. Dr. Grace was, in contrast, very clumsy, bumping into walls and falling over a lot. It does, upon reflection, resemble Chaplin. In this regard, Gosling was spot on.

"Project Hail Mary" hits theaters on March 20, 2026.