This Latino Played Rocky in ‘Project Hail Mary’
Credit: Amazon MGM Studios
If you watched Project Hail Mary and fell in love with Rocky, you’re not alone. But did you know that the person behind this lovable alien who befriends Ryan Gosling’s character is Latino?
James Ortiz, who is of Puerto Rican and Italian descent, was the puppeteer behind Rocky and the man responsible for making a character with no eyes and no smile feel alive. And he came to the job with a lot of experience. He is a director, actor, writer, designer, and puppeteer who was the recipient of a 2016 Obie Award for puppet design for his work on The Woodsman.
He brought that into making Rocky real. “It became all about posture and energy,” he said in an interview with The Latin Times. “There’s something very bossy, a little bit of a bully, but with love,” he explained about his character. “Because his brain moves so much faster than Grace’s, there’s a little bit of impatience there that I think I was definitely pulling from my family in a lot of different ways, especially my extended family.”
Ortiz wasn’t just the man behind Rocky, but also his voice, something that wasn’t part of the original plan. But after being Gosling’s scene partner for six months, there really was no other choice. “James understood Rocky so deeply that it got to a point where he knew what Rocky would say, what he wouldn’t say, and what he would do. James was Rocky, and James is Rocky now, and you can’t imagine it any other way,” Ryan Gosling told People about it.
And Ortiz made clear his mission was to make sure Gosling and his character Ryland Grace didn’t feel alone. He told Shade TV, “I had a mission that I decided early and that I didn’t tell anybody. No matter what, no matter what’s happening technically, I was going to be there for Ryan in any scene. I never, ever, ever wanted him to feel alone. Because there’s a version of this where it was a tennis ball, right? And I never wanted him to feel like he had to make up who Rocky was. I always wanted to present as much to him as possible.”
Project Hail Mary, based on a novel by Andy Weir, is now in theaters.