Ryan Gosling is an Oscar-nominated superstar whom we all love very much. But he’s not immune to life’s disappointments — like when he got fired from The Lovely Bones in the 2000s.
Based on the novel of the same name, The Lovely Bones came out in 2009 and stars Saoirse Ronan as Susie Salmon, a teen who is brutally murdered. The premise of the film is that Susie watches from purgatory as her grief-stricken family grapples with her death, and Ryan was initially set to play Jack, Susie’s father.
As the story goes, Ryan believed that Jack “should be 210 pounds,” so, before shooting began, he took it upon himself to gain some weight, which he did by drinking melted Häagen-Dazs ice cream whenever he was thirsty. Eventually, he showed up to set 60 pounds heavier, and the film’s director, Peter Jackson, was a little confused.
“We didn’t talk very much during the pre-production process, which was the problem,” Ryan told the Hollywood Reporter in 2010, saying that he and Peter had a “different idea of how the character should look.” “It was a huge movie, and there’s so many things to deal with, and he couldn’t deal with the actors individually. I just showed up on set, and I had gotten it wrong. Then I was fat and unemployed.”
So, it’s been nearly 17 years since the film premiered, and if you’re wondering why we’re talking about this now, it’s because Peter has finally spoken out about Ryan’s last-minute exit from the project.
Speaking at Cannes Film Festival, where he received an Honorary Palme d’Or last week, the three-time Oscar winner was asked specifically about The Lovely Bones and spoke candidly about replacing Ryan with Mark Wahlberg.
“I won’t talk about any particular examples of actors because it’s a personal, private thing and it’s not their fault,” he began. “Anytime we recast an actor, it’s actually our fault because we didn’t get the casting right and we cast the wrong person for a role. It’s not because they did anything wrong. So, I’m not going to talk about individuals, but you just got to realize that what you were imagining isn’t really quite happening, which means that we got it wrong and so we take full responsibility.”
Making it clear that there was never any animosity, Peter described Ryan as a “fantastic actor,” but said the issue came down to a miscommunication. “Films are a chemistry both on camera and behind the camera. They’re chemistry in terms of what the actor conveys to the audience of the film,” he said. “It’s just a complicated sort of amalgam of communication of how somebody gels into a group of people, into a story, into a character. It’s complicated, and usually you try very hard when you’re planning the film, casting it, trying to get that gel kind of right, but occasionally we make our own mistakes.”
Peter hasn’t talked publicly about The Lovely Bones casting mishap before; however, his wife and producing partner, Fran Walsh, told the Hollywood Reporter in 2009 that Ryan — who was still in his 20s at the time — felt that he’d been miscast from the very start.
“Ryan came to us two or three times and said, ‘I’m not the right person for this role. I’m too young.’ And we said, ‘No, no, no. We can age you up. We can thin your hair.’ We were very keen,” she recalled at the time. “It wasn’t until we were in pre-production and we had the cast there that it became increasingly clear: He was so uncomfortable moving forward, and we began to feel he was not right.”
Taking complete ownership of the issue, just as Peter has now done, Fran said: “It was our blindness, the desire to make it work no matter what.”
