FILM · 2026 · USA
Project Hail Mary
- Directed by
- Phil Lord, Christopher Miller
- Runtime
- 157 min
- Studio
- Lord Miller, Amazon MGM Studios, Pascal Pictures
31 archived facts 5 topics 2 sources Last reviewed Oct 2026
Science teacher Ryland Grace wakes up on a spaceship light years from home with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. As his memory returns, he begins to uncover his mission: solve the riddle of the mysterious substance causing the sun to die out. He must call on his scientific knowledge and unorthodox ideas to save everything on Earth from extinction.
31 Interesting Facts About Project Hail Mary
Interesting Facts (25)
- #001
Ryan Gosling's daughters, Esmeralda and Amada, would sometimes speak as his alien co-star Rocky (voiced in the film by James Ortiz) through an earpiece on set. Speaking about their help, Gosling said: "There are moments in the film where I laugh or I'm [so] affected by [Rocky], so it's actually my kids talking to me and helping me."
- #002
Grace briefly mentions that the Eridians never discovered relativity. The book explains that this is why Rocky's ship kept enough fuel for the return journey and to refuel the Hail Mary: they were unaware of the effects of relativistic time dilation and length contraction, so they thought they needed far more fuel to reach Tau Ceti.
- #003
The book does not include the scene in which Stratt watches Grace's video. In the book, Grace — and therefore the reader (the novel is written almost entirely in first person) — learns that he saved Earth when Rocky tells him that Eridian astronomers have determined that Earth's sun has regained its full power. It is therefore assumed that the "Beatles" successfully returned to Earth and that Stratt's people produced enough taumoebas to defeat the Astrophage and restore the sun to full power.
- #004
- #005
- #006
Eva Stratt, portrayed more as a project leader in the film, has almost total authority to carry out Project Hail Mary in the book. When the leaders of various nations asked her to run the project, she had two conditions: first, she would be given full authority and autonomy over the project, and second, the President of the United States, the President of Russia, the General Secretary of China, the prime ministers of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France and Japan, and the leaders of the other nations involved in the project had to grant her blanket amnesty for any state, federal and international laws she might need to break to complete the project. This placed Stratt above all government control and gave her access to whatever personnel or materials she needed. She has a much colder personality in the book because she is focused on a single thing: saving Earth at any cost. She has to make hard decisions, such as dropping nuclear bombs on the polar ice caps to release more CO2 and keep the world warm.
- #007
There are two important details about two major decisions that do not appear in the film. First, after Grace's scientific theory about life is proven irrelevant, the main reason he is included in the Hail Mary project is that he carries a rare gene that makes him suitable for the long comas required for the journey to Tau Ceti. All six astronauts (including the backups) carried this gene, so after the two scientist astronauts died in the explosion, finding a qualified scientist who also carried the rare gene was all but impossible. Second, Grace mentions that we would have to ration food in order to live longer, but this was before Rocky said he could spare some Astrophage fuel to get Grace home. When Grace realizes Rocky is stranded in space without fuel, he knows that if he saves Rocky he will not have enough food to return to Earth. Even if they could produce more Astrophage for fuel, he would starve to death before reaching Earth. Rocky then points out that Taumoeba is a protein and can be grown as food for Grace.
- #008
- #009
- #010
(At about 2 hours 20 minutes) Grace briefly fires the Hail Mary's main engines, then watches the Petrovascope screen until he sees a signal. The film gives no further context, but the book spends several pages explaining that Grace had to solve a needle-in-a-haystack problem: finding Rocky's ship while it was far beyond the Hail Mary's radar range. Grace's solution was to use the engines' immense power to emit a brief pulse of infrared light, then use the extremely sensitive Petrovascope to look for the point of light reflected from Rocky's ship. (Because of a 7-second delay, Rocky's ship was about 650,000 miles from the Hail Mary.)
- #011
- #012
During a flashback, Ryland shows his class that various sounds have unique patterns that can physically manifest. This points to Rocky, whose species works on echolocation and "sees" things in a way similar to Ryland's demonstration. It is also a hint at the technology Rocky uses to view screens.
- #013
- #014
- #015
- #016
Author Andy Weir made the first announcement that his book would become a film on 1 April 2022: "I'm excited to announce that Emma Stone will play Rocky in the film adaptation of Project Hail Mary. This will be a reunion for Stone with Ryan Gosling, who will play Ryland. Although the film is a bit different from the book, the on-screen dynamic and romantic scenes will more than make up for the small changes." It was an April Fools' joke. It was a joke, but years later Gosling's casting turned out to be correct; Rocky, however, was voiced by James Ortiz.
- #017
Grace's habit of hanging his glasses from his ears under his chin was something Ryan Gosling came up with. A few weeks into shooting he realised that people who wear glasses don't actually do this, but by then they had shot too many scenes of him doing it to remove the quirk. Daniel Craig's character in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) similarly has a habit of dangling his glasses from one ear.
- #018
When Grace first enters the connecting tunnel between his and Rocky's ships, the wall between the two atmospheres is made up of a patchwork of different materials. This is because, as the book also explains, Rocky is trying to work out which materials Grace can hear through. Rocky's species is completely blind and relies on echolocation based on sound and vibration. Grace, however, can see, so he naturally chooses transparent material, and when Rocky later rebuilds the tunnel, the wall is made entirely of transparent material.
- #019
In interviews, directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller said that in the future-Earth scene, Sandra Hüller's character Eva Stratt has a small, barely visible tattoo on her neck, indicating that she was tried for her actions in the film and sentenced to life imprisonment. She managed to escape, however, and went on to keep saving the world, ending up on the icebreaker in the frozen sea, where she found Grace's beatles. This shows that Stratt, despite initially receiving proactive pardons for breaking the laws necessary to complete Project Hail Mary, was ultimately tried on their behalf, as she predicted in the book.
- #020
- #021
- #022
- #023
Ryan Gosling's character Ryland Grace was in every scene. The only scene in which he was not actively present was Eva Stratt's final scene, and even then he was technically still on screen via a computer video. This is because the book is written from Ryland's point of view, so the reader only knew what Ryland was doing. The final scene with Eva was an addition made to close out whether Earth received the "beatle" probes.
- #024
- #025
In the book, first contact is very different: Grace is cautious but definitely excited and curious about the alien ship, concluding that if it wanted to harm him it would have done so already. He does not try to flee from it. The tunnel connecting the two ships is only a few metres long and has no gravity; because of the ship's design, it cannot rotate while attached to the Eridian ship, so they have to disconnect whenever they need gravity. Rocky built the wall from different materials, but his main purpose was to determine which one transmitted sound better from Grace's side. He had never actually considered that he would need a transparent wall. At that point Rocky does not even understand the concept of sight.
Production Story (1)
Behind the Scenes (2)
- #027
Grace said that "Rocky hate Mark" was improvised by both of them, with Grace saying his girlfriend left him to get Mark's and Rocky's reactions. It also borders on heartwarming because the Mark Ryan Gosling mentioned was a real-life longtime friend who had worked with him on various projects, and the real Mark was honored to have a personalized Easter egg in the film.
- #028
Characters & Cast (1)
- #029
Lead puppeteer James Ortiz originally recorded Rocky's translated lines with the understanding that they would be dubbed over by a professional actor. The directors, while watching early cuts, found the lines were done well enough and couldn't be improved upon by another actor, so Ortiz's performance was kept in the final movie.
Deeper Meaning (2)
- #030
The computer calculates that the return journey to Earth takes a little over 4 years. Although light takes 11.9 years to travel from Tau Ceti to Earth, this does not mean the Hail Mary moves faster than light. Because the ship reaches a speed close to the speed of light, relativistic effects (length contraction/time dilation) occur, which makes the journey take less time from the traveler's perspective. This means that while a little over four years pass for Grace, about 12 to 14 years pass for everyone on Earth.
- #031
While watching Grace's video logs, Stratt sees his ship travelling through half-frozen waters, implying that the planet has begun to cool dramatically because of the sun's dimming. In the book, Rocky confirms to Grace that Eridian scientists were able to determine that the Sun eventually returned to full strength, meaning Stratt and her team succeeded in introducing Taumoeba to Astrophage.
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Sources & editorial notes
Reference databases
- IMDb
Information from external sources is independently selected, consolidated and edited by Arka Evren. Sources are listed for verification and further reading. Encyclopedia text is used under its licence (CC BY-SA). How we work