At San Diego Comic-Con today, a very enthusiastic Hall H crowd greeted the team behind Project Hail Mary, the upcoming film based on the beloved book by The Martian author Andy Weir. Several scenes from early in the movie were shown, as we saw Ryan Gosling’s mild-mannered teacher, Ryland Grace, be recruited for a mission to space to save the Earth from imminent destruction thanks to a strange cosmic event.
And while the moments of Ryland adjusting to life in space – completely on his own, no less – and being introduced to something like Zero-G for the first time were very fun and entertaining, the scene the fans were clearly most excited for was our best look yet at the onscreen depiction of Rocky. Rocky is the alien Ryland encounters during his journey, who has been sent from his planet to stop the same crisis as Ryland, which also threatens his people. Rocky is a name eventually given to him by Ryland, because the two can’t speak to each other on account of Rocky looking like, well… rocks, which includes having no discernible face or features.
We were shown the scene where Ryland first spots Rocky’s ship, which is far larger than his, and itself resembles two large, asteroid-like objects from afar that turn out to be connected together. But when it came to Rocky himself, we got a shadowy taste via his entire very first scene, which expanded on moments briefly shown at the end of the trailer.
In the scene, we see Ryland descending out of a hatch from his ship into an opening in the alien spacecraft, wearing a spacesuit and breathing heavily. He floats down the large, cavernous opening of the other ship and notices that the rock-like walls are covered in intricate lines and designs. Finally, he reaches the bottom of the cavern and sees a small window, possibly indicating a door is there – except he can’t find anything on the wall that would seem to help open it up.
He begins to knock on the window when suddenly Rocky’s hand slams onto it from the other side with a very effective jump scare for both the audience and Ryland, who stumbles back screaming. When he gets back up, Rocky’s hand touches the glass again. Ryland gets closer as he sees Rocky hold up a small, thin figurine, looking like it might be been made from metal. It’s crude – somewhat evoking a skinny version of A Nightmare Before Christmas’ Oogie Boogie – but Ryland begins to understand, asking, “Is that me?!”
Rocky’s body remains hidden in the shadows, as we only see his arms and hands, as he holds up a representation he’s also made of Ryland’s ship and then puppets the Ryland figurine so it’s moving back up towards his toy ship. Ryland asks, “You want me to go back into my ship?” Rocky’s hands repeat the motion of the figurine, gently but insistent.
Ryland nods and enthusiastically tells Rocky, “Okay. I’ll talk to you later! Bye!” before waving back through the window and going back up towards his ship, ending Ryland and Rocky’s first encounter and the scene.
The panelists spoke at length about the challenges of depicting Rocky onscreen, with co-director Phil Lord saying that their approach was to take Weir’s ideas from the book and treat them like “creative provocations to us that we honored. We never wanted to make our lives more convenient by changing something that Andy did.”
Lord’s directing partner Christopher Miller said that when they were asked how the audience could care about a character without eyes, a mouth or a face, their reaction was, “Pixar made us care about a lamp. It’s possible!”
Lord and Miller ended up reaching out to Neal Scanlon at Lucasfilm to create Rocky, with Miller noting he “built a practical creature that was puppeteered by an amazing puppeteer named James Ortiz and his team of five. We call them the Rocketeers. And it was amazing having Rocky there on set every day so that we could have a real interaction and shoot the whole thing practically. And ultimately, it’s going to end up being a beautiful blend of creature puppetry and animation. He comes alive in a way that you really would die for this character. Rocky does not have a face. He has no eyes. He has five legs with three fingers on each leg.”
Lord added praise for visual effects supervisor Paul Lambert, whose work will be blended with that of Scanlan and Ortiz for the final version of Rocky, describing it as “a real handshake to create this really lovable person out of minerals.”
Lord and Miller said the final crucial component to believing in Rocky was Gosling and his performance and how he interacts with the character, with Lord describing him as akin to “the sixth puppeteer, because you need a scene partner to bring those characters to life, because he has to treat it like somebody that’s really there.”
Gosling meanwhile was humorously coy about his onscreen dynamic with Rocky, remarking, “He’s my friend, and he’s not here to speak for himself, so I don’t want to give up his secrets.”
Shortly after the panel, Lord, Miller and screenwriter Drew Goddard (who previously adapted Weir’s The Martian) stopped by IGN’s SDCC studio, where Goddard spoke more about the challenges of imagining Rocky’s onscreen depiction, saying, “It’s always the screenwriter’s nightmare, because you don’t even have a face, right? So how do you communicate? I think the very thing that makes it hard is the thing that makes it special. The challenge is what gets us all excited. The book is about empathy and about seeing something from someone else’s point of view, even if that other person is a cosmic alien who has no relation to humans whatsoever. That’s the point. And so every scene is about empathy.”
Describing Project Hail Mary, Lord remarked, “The movie is not a Mac, it’s a PC. It’s a machine. The ship is a machine. There’s complexities that are visible to the audience. We’re not trying to buff them out; when there were weird edges, we embraced them. The movie is very beautiful, but it’s not pretty, and it’s not ever slick.”
Project Hail Mary opens March 20, 2026.
