All 5 Project Hail Mary Deleted Scenes Explained

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Amaze amaze amaze! If you can't get enough of the bond between Ryan Gosling and a sentient jumble of space rocks in "Project Hail Mary," there's still more footage to be discovered. The 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray editions of the movie, which released earlier this month, include five deleted scenes that feature more details from the original novel, Gosling's physical comedy, and the relationship between reluctant astronaut Ryland Grace (Gosling) and Eridian engineer Rocky (James Ortiz).

These deleted scenes are just the tip of the iceberg. The original book by Andy Weir is a fun page-turner, but it's also densely packed with scientific details and problem-solving that couldn't all be included in the movie. It wasn't for lack of trying from directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, though. Their initial assembly cut of "Project Hail Mary" was almost four hours long, and even after cutting out all the bits that didn't quite work, they still had a three-hour film. After further shaving down the length of numerous scenes, they ultimately sent the movie to theaters with a runtime of just over 2.5 hours — and that time really zips by when you're watching it.

Now that audiences have fallen in love with Grace and Rocky, though, they're demanding to see more of them. Here's a breakdown of the five deleted scenes featured on the "Project Hail Mary" Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD release.

Having read "Project Hail Mary" in advance of seeing the movie, there were certain things that I assumed would be cut from the big screen adaptation. One of those things was the butt tube. You see, Andy Weir's original novel begins with Ryland Grace waking up from a coma to find an array of tubes in his body, including an IV, a catheter, and a tube up his butt. To my surprise, while the movie adaptation of "Project Hail Mary" does skim over many of the nitty-gritty scientific details of the book, the butt tube remained intact and is featured in a shot where the still-wobbly Grace slumps over on the floor.

The theatrical cut of the movie leaves out the moment in the book where Grace's waste tubes get suddenly and (in the case of the catheter) painfully ripped out. But in the extended version of the coma wake-up scene, the catheter is still tethered when Grace begins climbing the ladder in search of an exit. When the ship's computer instructs him to return to the medical silo, Grace takes matters into his own hands and rips his catheter out with a defiant scream. Ouch.

This deleted scene also includes another moment from the book, played up for comic effect, where the ship's robot arms (nicknamed "Armando") provide Grace with his first meal: a delicious tube of space sludge. In the book, the robot at least allows Grace the dignity of feeding himself. In the deleted scene, Armando tries to feed him like a baby and ends up smearing the paste all over Grace's face and beard. When he retaliates, he is gently reprimanded: "Please do not share the food paste with the medical arm." 

In the interval between Ryland Grace waking up and arriving at Tau Ceti, there really isn't much for him to do — especially since he can't remember who he is, how he got there, or what he's supposed to be doing. Nonetheless, he finds ways to fill the time ... which mostly involve messing around, getting drunk, and crashing out.

This sequence was originally a lot longer. "There's about half an hour's worth of material of him flipping out, being drunk, being unable to deal with anything," Chris Miller revealed. But when he and Phil Lord showed the three-hour cut of "Project Hail Mary" to test audiences, people "had a hard time with it," as Lord explained. "You can be sad for two minutes in a movie, but then you've got to get a move on." And so, the directors cut the montage down to "the length of one Kris Kristofferson song" ("Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down," to be precise).

The second deleted scene is an alternative cut of Grace's crash-out that features a selection of the footage that was cut from the theatrical version (as backed by Nat King Cole singing "Let's Face the Music and Dance"). Among the new clips: Grace creatively using a whiteboard to play versions of games like darts, attempting to remain stable in the ship's 'don't go crazy room' by interacting with footage of jellyfish and sea lions, and slow-dancing with Armando before removing Armando from his list of "dislikes." He also does all of this while wearing an array of eccentric outfits and in various states of drunkenness.

"All things considered, I think I'm handling things pretty awesome," Grace brags in between bouts of sobbing.

In the previous deleted scene, Grace (who is experiencing amnesia after his coma) comments, "I'm still waiting for my astronaut training to kick in." Eventually, of course, he learns that he doesn't have any astronaut training. This makes things tricky for him when he has to get into his spacesuit and go for a space walk in order to catch an object being flung at the Hail Mary from Rocky's ship.

The theatrical cut of "Project Hail Mary" features an abridged montage of Grace clumsily figuring out how to climb into his spacesuit, but the deleted scenes include an extended version of this sequence. First, he tries reading a manual, but he's frustrated by the fact that it's in Russian. Unfortunately, his shipmate Olesya Ilyukhina (Milana Vayntrub) is no longer alive to read it to him. Luckily, though, the ship's computer has a video manual (with distinct DIY YouTube vibes) where members of the Hail Mary tech team back on Earth demonstrate step-by-step how to get into a spacesuit. Grace's execution of the instructions isn't exactly agile, but there's a fun shot of him squirming his way into the contraption via some funky hip-wiggling.

It's an entertaining extra, but it's also easy to see why it was cut. At this point in the film, audiences are just excited to see the first human-alien interaction, so a spacesuit comedy sequence would have ground the pace to a frustrating halt.

One quirk of Rocky's species, the Eridians, is that they sleep very, very deeply. So deeply, in fact, that nothing other than the natural end of their sleep cycle can wake them up. This coma-like sleep leaves them vulnerable to danger, so Eridians evolved a heartwarming social practice: taking turns to watch over each other while they sleep. Rocky, who is still grief-stricken from helplessly watching over his crewmates as they died, insists on watching his squishy new human friend sleep as well.

The fourth deleted scene from "Project Hail Mary" takes place after Rocky has moved into Grace's ship and set up his new bedroom overlooking Grace's bed. At this point in their relationship, Grace still isn't entirely comfortable with having an alien intensely observing him while he sleeps, and Rocky doesn't make it any easier by tapping one of his rocky digits to count out the seconds of sleep. Grace, struggling to drift off, asks Rocky to watch him more quietly and to shift out of his line of sight. Though he does so initially, Rocky soon tries to creep back to his original position so he can "peer" at Grace. 

(It's probably for the best that this was cut, otherwise it would have been subject to nitpicking. Since Rocky doesn't have eyes and "sees" using his hearing, he doesn't need to be in Grace's line of sight to observe him sleeping.)

In addition, this scene drops an extra tidbit of information: Eridians don't dream when they sleep, so Grace has to explain dreams to Rocky. "It's like another life that you live where crazy stuff happens, but it all makes sense," he says to the sentient rock that he shares a bunk bed with.

The movie adaptation of "Project Hail Mary" necessarily condenses the book's detailed imaginary science surrounding astrophage, the star-eating life form dimming Earth's sun, and its natural predator, Taumoeba, which is the key to saving Earth. However, the final deleted scene brings to life one piece of speculation from the book: that astrophage originally evolved in Tau Ceti and then traveled to both our own solar system and to the 40 Eridani star system, where Rocky comes from. And not only did it migrate to those systems, but it sowed the seeds for life in both of them (a scientific event known as "panspermia"). This would mean that humans and Eridians both evolved from astrophage. Or, as Grace puts it, "Maybe we're cousins!"

After having their minds appropriately blown by this theory, Grace and Rocky get back to the task at hand: figuring out how to save their respective stars. Grace is soon distracted when Rocky strikes an odd pose that he describes as his "thinking" pose, but which to Grace just looks like weird silent staring. So, before they get down to the business of saving their worlds, Grace teaches Rocky to pantomime human thinking, complete with tapping his head and making a humming sound.