How Ryan Gosling learned to float for Project Hail Mary

Ryan Gosling spent much of Project Hail Mary hanging from wires and trying not to move like he was on Earth.

Visual effects supervisor Paul Lambert has explained how the team built convincing weightlessness around the actor, speaking at the View Conference in Turin, Italy, as reported by Variety. The film is directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and adapts Andy Weir's novel about a lone astronaut on a deep-space mission.

Lambert, who shared the supervision role with Mag Sarnowska, said believable zero gravity was his biggest personal concern going into the production. A visual effects supervisor leads the teams that create and blend computer-generated imagery with live action. Getting floating bodies wrong would break the whole illusion.

The team briefly considered using vomit-comet flights. These are aircraft manoeuvres where a plane dives to create short bursts of real weightlessness for training and filming. They rejected the idea because the spacecraft sets were too large and elaborate to rebuild inside a plane.

Instead, Gosling worked on wire rigs. One included a rotating harness that let him spin and tumble while suspended. He did his own stunt work, including demanding spacewalk material that required long periods in the harness.

The wires had to vanish. Artists painted them out, then adjusted the position of his legs, arms and torso to remove any sense of strain or weight. They also added slowly drifting objects around him to reinforce the floating effect.

Real star data helped place the ship in space. The effects team used measurements from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, which charts the positions of stars, to map the stretch between Earth and Tau Ceti. That star, about 11.9 light-years away, is central to the voyage in the story and to the long views of space seen travelling between the two points.

Lambert and Sarnowska were listed by the View Conference as VFX co-supervisors speaking on the film, according to the View Conference site. The 2026 edition of the conference was held on October 12-16, 2026 in Torino, Italy.

What makes this stand out is how physical the solution remained. For fans, this means the floating you will see on screen starts with a performer learning to drift on wires, with computers finishing the trick.