Meryl Streep landed the role she was born to play in Project Hail Mary — the computerized voice of a rock-like alien.
In the sci-fi thriller from Chris Lord and Phil Miller, Ryan Gosling plays Dr. Ryland Grace, an astronaut who, in the not-so-distant future, makes first contact with an intelligent alien life form that looks like a cross between a small boulder and a giant spider. He names it Rocky.
Lacking any discernible face, Rocky doesn’t speak in the traditional sense. Instead, he communicates through musical tones and chords that sound almost like whale songs. Once Dr. Grace figures this out, he programs a computer to translate the notes into English words.
Ryan Gosling and Rocky in ‘Project Hail Mary’
Credit: amazon/mgm studios
When it comes time for Dr. Grace to select a computerized voice to act as Rocky’s artificial translator, he scrolls through a number of preloaded options, one of which is, you guessed it, three-time Oscar-winner Meryl Streep.
“When we were on set, we did a bunch of silly voices ourselves,” Miller tells Entertainment Weekly. “We had people from the crew do voices just to make Ryan laugh and have the characters have something to react to.”
“We tried to imagine voices that would be preloaded into a text-to-speech kind of translator,” Lord adds.
“And then we [thought], wouldn’t it be fun to get Meryl Streep? And Ryan just said, ‘She can do anything,’ and that was perfect,” Miller explains.
Then came the difficult part. “So we’re like, Okay, well, now we’ve got to ask Meryl Streep,” he continues. “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—”
“You have never seen a group of filmmakers procrastinate longer,” Lord interjects with a laugh. “And then she did, and she was wonderful.”
Rocky and Ryan Gosling’s hand in ‘Project Hail Mary’
Credit: Amazon MGM Studios
“And she was so fun and thoughtful and playful and did a million different versions: ‘I’ll do more. You want me to try this? Try that?'” Miller says.
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“But every time you rehearsed in the mirror, going, Meryl, would you by any chance want to play a rejected voice of an alien? Just trying to explain it to her…” Lord says, laughing. “You know what? I’m going to ask her tomorrow.”
See Streep nail her role as a rejected alien voice in Project Hail Mary, in theaters now.
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