Project Hail Mary's Rocky Actor Points Out A Subtle Detail You May Have Missed [Exclusive]

"Project Hail Mary" was a major box office success, and much of that was thanks to its lovable alien character, Rocky. The rock-like alien who becomes close friends with Ryan Gosling's scientist Ryland Grace was puppeteered and voiced by James Ortiz, who made sure to include a subtle vocal detail to represent the fact Rocky's voice was ultimately being generated by computer translation software.

Rocky is an Eridian from the planet Erid who encounters Ryan Gosling's Grace while both are on missions to save their planets from a light-devouring microbe. The craboid alien with no facial features and the inability to speak English communicates using a series of sounds that are essentially musical tones and chords. To get over that particular hurdle, Grace uses his computers to create a translation system that allows him to communicate, and ultimately forge an unbreakable bond, with his Eridian pal.

/Film's Ben Pearson recently interviewed Ortiz, who spoke about crafting Rocky's voice, and it turns out there was much more to it than simply finding the right tone and pitch. 

"I was actually vocally really interested in how much [Rocky's] voice box would be buffering and going wrong," Ortiz said. "Because it's two laptops duct-taped together." This is a reference to Grace's makeshift translation system, which he creates on the fly after meeting Rocky and which isn't exactly the most refined technological solution. It seems Ortiz was trying to keep that in mind when reading Rocky's lines by doing his own impression of a glitchy computerized AI voice.

"Project Hail Mary" is full of hidden details. There's a brief cameo from the original audiobook narrator, Ray Porter, as well as many sci-fi easter eggs hidden throughout. But there's also some hidden details in James Ortiz's Rocky voice itself. Originally, Ortiz wasn't aware that he'd be voicing Rocky in "Project Hail Mary." As he told Variety, he did read the lines on-set but presumed directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller would replace his audio with another actor's for the final cut. They didn't, and much of that surely came down to how seriously he took the task of voicing Ryland Grace's Eridian friend, and how well his take on the material came out.

Talking about Grace's hastily-built AI translation system and how it related to his creation of Rocky's voice, Ortiz told /Film, "It's not the top brass. So it should probably feel like something is a bit of a mess vocally [...] a lot of it's just me doing an affectation [of a robotic-sounding glitchiness to the voice] and just playing the beats." According to Ortiz, the editors experimented with the audio "in some of the early takes," especially during the scene in which Grace cycles through different options for how Rocky's voice should sound. "They took several takes of me and mashed it together so it sounded a little bit wrong," he explained. "But for the most part after that, it's kind of just me."

For the rest of the movie, then, we're mostly hearing Ortiz's impression of what a makeshift, computerized AI voice should sound like. But there was more to it than that, as Rocky's voice subtly changes the more comfortable he becomes communicating with Grace.

Voicing Rocky clearly wasn't just an afterthought for James Ortiz, who, aside from trying to infuse a certain computerized artificiality into his vocal performance, also had to take into account how Rocky's use of language evolved throughout "Project Hail Mary." 

"The thing that also is fun is that Rocky becomes more comfortable with English over the course of the story," he explained. "He's not using it as a hammer, he's using it as almost poetry. So there was a funny series of choices to be made of how normal can the AI sound? And I say AI because it's a system on the ship, not because we used any [to make the movie]."

"Project Hail Mary" might be a hard sci-fi adventure based on science stickler Andy Weir's 2021 novel, but it's also a charming family film with a lovable supporting character. It you think about it, that's a tough balance to strike, and one that Ortiz had to face when crafting his take on Rocky's AI voice. How do you make something sound computerized enough to make sense as the product of technology, yet humanize it enough to sell the film's all-important emotional moments? Well, Ortiz ultimately pulled it off, and you can see why Phil Lord and Chris Miller didn't replace him with another voice actor. Heck, professional scientific scold Neil DeGrasse Tyson actually felt pretty positive about "Project Hail Mary," so Ortiz must have done something right.