Hollywood veteran Meryl Streep recorded “a million different versions” for her brief audio cameo in Ryan Gosling’s Project Hail Mary, the makers recently revealed in an interview.
The 76-year-old lent her voice to an uncredited role in the Ryan Gosling-starrer, which follows an ordinary schoolteacher Dr Ryland Grace, who wakes up aboard a spaceship with no memory of how he got there, before forming an unlikely bond with an intelligent extraterrestrial organism.
In the film, Grace builds a translation system to communicate with the alien, whom he names Rocky. The programme offers a preselected menu of voice options to choose from — one of which features Streep.
Co-director Chris Miller told Entertainment Weekly that the actress approached the process with excitement, experimenting with multiple variations of her way of speech. “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?’” he said.
Miller added that the idea came about from lighthearted moments on set when the cast and crew initially tried out “a bunch of silly voices” to make Gosling respond to them during scenes.
“When we were on set, we did a bunch of silly voices ourselves. We had people from the crew do voices just to make Ryan laugh and have the characters have something to react to,” Miller added.
His co-director Phil Lord said, “We tried to imagine voices that would be preloaded into a text-to-speech kind of translator.” The idea of bringing Streep on board emerged suddenly when the duo thought it would be “fun”.
With the help of producer Amy Pascal, who has previously collaborated with the actress on films such as The Post, the filmmakers reached out.
“We (thought), wouldn’t it be fun to get Meryl Streep? And Ryan just said, ‘She can do anything’, and that was perfect. So we’re like, ‘OK, well, now we’ve got to ask Meryl Streep,' and so then you’re like, ‘OK, 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’,” Miller recalled.
Lord admitted the team hesitated before approaching Streep “You have never seen a group of filmmakers procrastinate longer,” he said, adding that Streep ultimately came on board and “was wonderful”.
Alongside the voice work, Gosling has performed many of his scenes opposite a practical puppet rather than a CGI character, helping ground the film’s emotional heart.