Peter Jackson In Ryan Gosling’s Shooting From Lovely Bones
Ryan Gosling is the Oscar-nominated actor we all love so much. But he is not immune to life’s disappointments – like when he gets fired Dear Bones in the 2000s.
Based on the novel of the same name, Dear Bones came out in 2009 and starred Saoirse Ronan as Susie Salmon, a teenager who was brutally murdered. The premise of the film is that Susie watches from purgatory as her grieving family grapples with her death, and Ryan was originally set to play Jack, Susie’s father.
As the story goes, Ryan believed that Jack “should be 210 pounds,” so, before shooting began, he made a commitment to gain weight, which he did by drinking melted Häagen-Dazs ice cream whenever he was standing. In the end, he showed that he had put on 60 kilograms, and the director of the film, Peter Jackson, was a little confused.
“We didn’t talk much during the pre-production process, which was a problem,” Ryan told The Hollywood Reporter in 2010, saying that he and Peter had a different idea of what the character should look like. “It was a hit movie, there were a lot of things he had to deal with, he couldn’t deal with the actors individually, I just showed up on the set, I missed it, then I got fat and I didn’t work.
So, it’s been almost 17 years since the movie premiered, and if you’re wondering why we’re talking about this now, it’s because Peter finally talked about Ryan’s last-minute exit from the project.
Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival, where he received the Honorary Palme d’Or last week, the three-time Oscar winner was asked directly Dear Bones and spoke candidly about replacing Ryan with Mark Wahlberg.
“I will not talk about some examples of actors because it is a personal, private matter and it is not their fault,” he began. “Whenever we recast an actor, it’s actually our fault because we didn’t find the right one and we made the wrong person to play the part. It’s not that he did anything wrong. So, I won’t talk about individual people, but you have to realize that what you thought didn’t really happen, which means we made a mistake so we take full responsibility.”
Making it clear that there was never any animosity, Peter described Ryan as a “fantastic actor,” but said it came down to a miscommunication. “Films are chemistry both on camera and behind the camera.” They’re part of the chemistry of what the actor conveys to the audience,” he said. “It’s a complex form of communication that shows how a person fits into a group of people, becomes a story, becomes an actor. It’s complicated, and you’re usually trying hard when you’re editing the film, casting it, trying to get that gel right, but sometimes we make our own mistakes.”
Peter did not speak publicly Dear Bones cleaning before; However, his wife and producing partner, Fran Walsh, told The Hollywood Reporter in 2009 that Ryan – who was 20 at the time – felt he had been lost from the 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 make you sick. We can straighten your hair.’ We were very serious,” he recalled at the time. “It wasn’t until we were in production and we had the actors there that it became clear: He wasn’t comfortable going forward, and we started to feel that he wasn’t right.”
Taking full ownership of the story, just as Peter has now, Fran said: “It was our blindness, the desire to make it work no matter what.”
