Who Voices Rocky In Ryan Gosling's Project Hail Mary

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's sci-fi film "Project Hail Mary" sees scientist Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) making first contact with an alien, and the two of them strike up a close friendship despite being extremely different on a physiological level. Grace is a human, made mostly of water and carbon (a "leaky space blob," as Rocky calls him in the book). Rocky is an Eridian, who is made of, well, rocks, and has five arms but no face. 

Given the cosmic nature of the story, it would have been simpler to just stick Ryan Gosling in front of a green screen, have "Rocky" represented on set by a tennis ball on a stick, and build most of the movie using CGI. However, as Miller explained to The Hollywood Reporter, the directing duo wanted the movie to feel "real... natural [and] captured in the moment," so the interior of Grace's ship was built entirely as a physical set. Meanwhile, Rocky was physically present on set as a puppet, operated by lead puppeteer James Ortiz and his team of technicians (the "Rockyteers"). For shots requiring rapid or complicated movements, Rocky was animated by the visual effects artists at Framestore.

Ortiz told Variety that he and Gosling would initially rehearse scenes with Ortiz crawling around on the floor instead of the puppet, so that the two of them could make eye contact and figure out the beats of the scene. Then, once the puppet was brought in for filming, Ortiz would recite Rocky's lines from off-screen. He thought it was likely that a celebrity actor would be brought in to dub Rocky's lines in post-production, but Lord and Miller eventually told Ortiz that they were sticking with his voice.

"Getting that call was incredible," Ortiz told Variety. "I'd convinced myself it wouldn't be me."

"Project Hail Mary" isn't the first time that James Ortiz has combined puppeteering with more traditional acting. The performer's stage background includes creating the Obie Award-winning off-Broadway show "The Woodsman," about a human woodsman who is transformed into the tin woodsman from "The Wizard of Oz." Ortiz played the lead character in his human form and also puppeteered the transformed woodsman.

Despite this experience, it's understandable that Ortiz expected to be replaced. That was the fate of Doug Jones' voice performance for Abe Sapien in Guillermo del Toro's "Hellboy." Sony hired "Frasier" star David Hyde Pierce to re-record the character's lines, not because of any problem with Jones' performance, but purely for marketing purposes. (After hearing the dialogue Jones had recorded on set, Pierce was confused about why the studio had hired him to over-dub it and ultimately refused to take credit for the role.)

"Project Hail Mary" even features a gag about Hollywood's obsession with celebrity voice actors when Grace is trialing possible computerized voices for Rocky — one of which is Oscar-winning star Meryl Streep. Ultimately, they settle on Ortiz's more robotic-sounding tones.

"Rocky's voice comes out of a series of computers that have been sort of duct-taped together, so I though it probably shouldn't sound great," Ortiz explained to Variety. "I thought it shouldn't sound like the top AI you ever heard. There should be a little bit of Mr. Moviefone and a little bit of Siri, only not as clean."

"Project Hail Mary" is in theaters now.