Meryl Streep recorded "a million different versions" of her Project Hail Mary cameo.
The 76-year-old actress lent her voice in an uncredited role as part of Ryan Gosling's new sci-fi film, which features school teacher-turned astronaut Dr. Ryland Grace, who awakes on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there, before finding an unlikely ally in an intelligent extra-terrestrial.
To help Grace communicate with his new friend, who he calls Rocky, he creates a translation system and choses between a pre-selected menu of voice choices for the programme, one of which ended up being Streep.
CO-director Chris Miller told Entertainment Weekly: "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 recalled how the process started with people on set doing "a bunch of silly voices" to make Gosling laugh.
He explained: "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.”
His collaborator Ryan Lord added: “We tried to imagine voices that would be preloaded into a text-to-speech kind of translator."
The duo suddenly decided it would be "fun" to get Streep on board, and they got to work.
Miller recalled: "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 -'
Lord laughed: "You have never seen a group of filmmakers procrastinate longer. And then she did, and she was wonderful.”
As well as stand-in voices on set, Gosling also performed with a real-life puppet instead of a CGI creation.
James Ortiz, a theatre performer known for work on Broadway productions including The Skin of Their Teeth and Into the Woods, operated an elaborate puppet representing the alien character Rocky, and he was present on set for most scenes involving the character as Gosling’s co-performer.
Explaining the approach, Ortiz told Variety: “Actor to actor, I didn’t want Ryan to ever feel like he was alone in this.
“It would be too hard. I mean, he shouldn’t have to make character decisions for a strange, faceless creature.”
The production team adapted the set design to accommodate puppeteers, elevating structures above the soundstage floor and incorporating access points to allow for movement and positioning during filming.
For certain sequences, a fully animatronic version of Rocky was used, while more complex scenes required digital enhancement from visual effects company Framestore.
Ortiz added: “As you can imagine, puppeteering rolling in a ball through a ship would be pretty impossible to pull off.
“That’s where digital effects come into play.”
