‘Project Hail Mary’ author Andy Weir talks Ryan Gosling, making science entertaining

NEW YORK – I should’ve known bringing Andy Weir to a science museum was like bringing a kid to a candy store and asking them to keep their hands in their pockets.

Days before the movie “Project Hail Mary” comes out, the sci-fi author and I meet at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The adaptation of Weir’s 2021 novel stars Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, the former middle school science teacher and sole survivor of a last-ditch effort mission to save humanity from sun-eating microbes. 

The book may be dense with what Gosling calls “space math,” but even the right-brained find something to love through blood pressure-raising mission and a loveable craggy alien, Rocky. 

Therein lie Weir’s hallmarks as a writer – hard math, humor and high stakes. Before his first novel, “The Martian,” found a home at Penguin Random House in 2014, he self-published it on his blog for free. Now, Weir’s novels have a cult following of science nerds and casual readers alike. I can confidently say I’ve never seen another book read as widely on the New York City subway system as “Project Hail Mary.” 

“I thought I was writing for this niche audience who wanted to see the math,” Weir tells me. “I thought I was writing for 0.001% of people, but it turns out that lots of people enjoyed it. They would just kind of like skim the math. They’d be like ‘I believe you.’”

He doesn’t care to pare down the science to make an easier reading experience. That said, he takes care to include only the information that the reader actually needs to understand the plot. (“They don’t have to pass a test afterward,” he says.) His main objective, after all, is to entertain. 

Watching Andy Weir geek out at the science museum

Andy Weir is distracted. Understandably so. The museum houses an impressive collection of scaled models, factoids and James Webb Space Telescope images. Upstairs in the Hayden Planetarium, a new short film narrated by Pedro Pascal is showing. Sporting a tan fedora and stuffing his hands in his pockets, Weir has a half smile that’s always primed for a nerdy joke. We gaze up at the hanging planet models and reminisce about a time before Pluto was demoted from the planetary lineup. He tells me about a Pluto shirt he saw once with a saying that made him laugh: “I was big enough for your mom.” 

We’re accompanied by Ruth Angus, the museum’s associate curator of astrophysics. They speak the same language − I feel a bit like I’m third wheeling. The two immediately start swapping trivia and relative distance analogies. Weir performs a very complicated math problem to one of these when prompted; his eyes off somewhere distant as he calculates, smile unchanged.

“You’re actually astonishing me right now,” she tells him, and I agree. He lost me about two numbers into it.

Both Weir and Angus came to science through fiction. Weir grew up reading his dad’s “boomer-era sci-fi.” His “holy trinity” is authors Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein. The movie “Apollo 13” was another big inspiration. 

Angus, who describes herself as an “uber nerd” and Weir fan, thinks the author has a hand in inspiring a new generation of science lovers.

“I think your books are doing what a lot of science communications wish they could do, which is write something that is so compelling that you just want to read it and you might absorb some science along the way,” Angus says. “So many science communicators just want to grab the attention of people.”

Weir humbly counters that science communicators have it much “harder” because they actually want to educate.

“If someone comes away from it remembering some science, I’m happy about it, but I know my place in the world and that’s just to entertain people and just have a good time when they’re reading,” Weir says. “But I do it my way because I’m a science dork.”

Weir says Ryan Gosling brought 'nuance' to ‘Project Hail Mary’

As a movie, “Project Hail Mary” is impressively faithful, recreating many pivotal scenes beat-for-beat. Weir was a producer, unlike in “The Martian” adaptation starring Matt Damon, where his only job was to “cash the check.” This time around, he was there for the filming and major decision-making.

“I actually got to matter a bit,” he quips. 

He was the film’s resident expert on the “nitty gritty stuff,” which makes sense given some of the science he made up. He clarifies that most of it is accurate, but he’s “proud that you have to get down to the quantum level to find the bulls---.

“I was the only source of information on that,” he says. 

Take note when you watch Gosling’s character writing on a whiteboard in space. Before they shot those scenes, Weir wrote down the calculations to copy and Gosling did his best to memorize. Then, while the camera was rolling, directors fed him the exact numbers via earpiece. 

Though Weir says Gosling wasn’t much interested in the science, the actor cared that the film was as accurate as possible. Gosling flies solo for much of the movie, a heavy lift of a role. 

“He added a lot of nuance to the character, just via body language and alternate lines. He would come up with other lines. He got to ad lib, of course. So he ended up with a much deeper, more nuanced version of Ryland than I ever wrote,” Weir says. “I think that's like my biggest weakness as a writer, in my opinion, is character depth and complexity. I've come up with interesting plots and interesting fake science, but my characters are kind of shallow and so I'm working on that. I want to get better.”

Creating alien sidekick Rocky in 'Project Hail Mary'

Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller brought Weir's vision of Rocky to life. Rather than CGI, puppeteers brought Ryland’s bestie to life. Gosling, in another interview with USA TODAY, called the engineering-minded alien “a bit of a diva” for traveling with a glam squad of six puppeteers. 

Weir says it was Lord and Miller’s experience in animation on “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” and “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” that made him want to work with them. He praised their execution of Rocky, which is “exactly as it was in the book.”

“Could not have done a better job,” Weir says. “They know how to do animation, and animation is what's necessary to have a faceless rock be something that you care about. It all has to be done via body language and motion.”

Forget saving humanity, it's this unexpected friendship that's the real jewel of the story. Readers of "Project Hail Mary" know how much this little alien can tug on your heartstrings. Weir shouldn’t sell himself short, I point out. There is, indeed, plenty of emotion and character in that duo.

“This is me giving it a shot. This is me trying my hardest. This is my best!” he tells me, curtsying. 

Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY’s Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you’re reading at [email protected].