fandom things

Coming from a trained actor who has worked on movie sets:

there are more than thousands of people and crew on set at all times

the director, assistant director, sound crew, lighting crew, cinematographer, and camera man are usually less than 50 feet away from you, you talk to them constantly if you are not an asshole to work with, which, reportedly (people in hollywood talk) Gosling is not

they work 12 hour days, with breaks, there's usually a 1 hour lunch break where cast, crew, and everyone else talk with each other. Family and friends can come talk to you here, depending on how intense the set is security and secrecy wise. but you can call people

the filming of project hail mary took about 5 months, but Ryan Gosling wasn't sitting there all alone in a dark room talking to a standing camera

what James Ortiz was referring to in the interview about "helping him feel less alone" was that he was giving Ryan Gosling a scene partner, and saying the lines and giving him a face to react to. This is something that happens in a lot of one-on-one scenes, sometimes they'll make you go stand next to the camera so that way an actor has an actual face to react to.

That was not keeping him sane, Ortiz was helping him act. Gosling did spend 100 days-ish alone on set IN THE SCENES, and hats-off to him because he did such a good job, but he was not developing isolation sickness. I think it would actually, in every sense of the term, be physically impossible to develop isolation sickness on a movie set, my brain is going ??????????

anyways, final point 2 points: NO ONE HAS SAID THIS EVER IN ANY INTERVIEW I CAN FIND

he stepped up to live voice rocky on the spot (he and ryan gosling improvised a large portion of the scenes) before being chosen to be rocky’s final voice. he also did the scary & sexy voices they test out, and he has a cameo in the film as the tv interviewer:

he’s italian & puerto rican and openly gay. here he is with rocky himself:

I finally got around to making more Project Hail Mary fanart :]

IT'S MARKIPLIER

I can't remember where I first saw this information, but apparently Rocky's aim was to make the wall to the tunnel out of many different materials to find out which one Grace is able to see through easiest, not based on opacity - like a human or something that evolved to see light does - but based on acoustic impedance. For anyone who doesn't know what that is, it's a way of measuring how easily sound passes through a material - usually used in ultrasound scans. Therefore, for a species who uses echo-location, he's working out which material is easiest for Grace to see through - and from what I can tell he just got lucky with the clear Xenonite. I'm also fairly sure that he was completely unaware about species that see through light waves rather than echo-location, based on his reactions to Grace in the movie.

Basically, Rocky wanted to make things as accessible as he could for any alien that he could come across with the limited knowledge that he had of how different species see things. He is essentially setting himself up to be as accessible as he can for anyone he could possible meet out there. Whether its due to desperation for connection, or just because he's Like That, that's why I think he's so neat. His first interaction with Grace is just him trying to make Grace as comfortable as possible.