Ryan Gosling's kids made him look 'smarter' for 'Project Hail Mary'

Before Ryan Gosling heads off to the \

Ryan Gosling is blasting off to a galaxy far, far away. First, though, he has to save this one.

Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, “Project Hail Mary” (in theaters March 20) rockets Gosling into an interstellar journey as Ryland Grace, a middle-school science teacher turned reluctant astronaut. The sun is dying out, Grace is sent on a last-ditch mission to keep humankind from going extinct, and he teams with an alien to help each other’s planets.

“This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a lightning-in-a-bottle story and characters, and it had potential to be one of those core memory movies where you remember where you were when you saw it,” says Gosling, a producer on the film, which adapts Andy Weir’s sci-fi bestseller. He and his wife, Eva Mendes, “always want to find films that we can bring our kids to and have that core memory moment, but they're hard to find. I felt like, OK, well, we might just have to make it.”

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Gosling, 45, has dabbled in sci-fi and space movies before − “First Man,” “Blade Runner 2049” – but he’s packing serious punch with “Hail Mary” and next year’s “Star Wars: Starfighter,” set five years after “The Rise of Skywalker.”