Project Hail Mary directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller procrastinated in asking Meryl Streep to make a brief voice cameo in their sci-fi.
In the new movie, Ryan Gosling plays an astronaut alone in space who makes contact with an intelligent alien lifeform that he nicknames Rocky.
Rocky does not speak our language, so Gosling’s Dr. Grace programs a computer to translate Rocky’s sounds into English words, and he tries different computerised voices to find the right one for Rocky.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Lord and Miller revealed that they were originally doing “a bunch of silly voices ourselves” on set, trying to “imagine voices that would be preloaded into a text-to-speech kind of translator”.
They then came up with the idea of Streep’s voice being one of the program’s preloaded options – but were hesitant about asking the three-time Oscar winner to be a computerised voice.
“So we’re like, Okay, well, now we’ve got to ask Meryl Streep,” Miller recalled. “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…”
Lord interjected with a laugh, “You have never seen a group of filmmakers procrastinate longer.”
He continued, “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…You know what? I’m going to ask her tomorrow.”
Pascal eventually reached out to Streep, and she agreed to do it, and the filmmakers were impressed with The Devil Wears Prada star’s commitment to the task.
“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 praised.
Ultimately, Rocky is voiced by James Ortiz, who also serves as one of the creature’s on-set puppeteers.
Project Hail Mary is in cinemas now.
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