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There may or may not be a hero inside all of us, but Ryan Gosling’s sidelined scientist and reluctant astronaut in “Project Hail Mary” proves that there is, at least, a Mary Maxim cardigan with two foxes on it inside everyone.
Part of how the Phil Lord and Christopher Miller hit articulates the heart and the hope of its story is through the work done by costume designers Glyn Dillon and David Crossman to give Dr. Ryland Grace (Gosling) a sartorial warmth that connects him to Earth and to humanity, even when he’s 11.9 light-years away.
Gosling himself wanted Grace to have a bunch of science joke t-shirts, partly as an homage to Val Kilmer in “Real Genius.” But even while wearing dad pun-approved shirts and a yellow raincoat fit for Paddington Bear, Ryan Gosling still looks like Ryan Gosling. The costume design team needed to make sure he looked good in “Project Hail Mary,” but never too cool. “It was about trying to find things that would bring it back a bit, so he’s not Robert Redford in space,” Dillon told IndieWire.
Enter the chonky knitwear Grace wears both as part of the worldwide research effect into the mysterious organism known as “astrophage” that is dimming Earth’s sun, and once he wakes up on the Hail Mary, after the spaceship travels to Tau Ceti to find out why that star appears to be immune. Dillon and Crossman’s instinct was to give Grace an unpretentious, comforting look and then make it as nerdy as possible. This translated into quarter zips and cardigans perfect for watching the fog roll in off the Bay in San Francisco, but not perfect for being especially fashionable.
Dillon even got some encouragement from the Internet that the costume team had gone in the right direction. “I saw Derek Guy, the menswear guy, post after we’d done all this stuff with quarter zips. He was talking about quarter zips and how he’s not keen on them, and he listed a load of alternatives for men who would like to wear some knitwear. I thought that was a great affirmation of what we were trying to do,” Dillon said.
The costume design team’s work is never down to just finding the right piece. For example, Dillon stumbled on Grace’s cardigan at the Mildmay Vintage Fayre, doing a very last-minute shop the morning before the first “Project Hail Mary” fitting with Gosling, but the original piece had two wolves on the front of it. Dillon decided to get the slightly more aggressive-looking knit for himself, but because he was going straight from the fair to the fitting, he had it with him. Gosling fell in love with the piece but suggested a version of it with fox faces and fox footprints instead.
“The saying goes ‘One is None’ in the costume department because you need a few [copies of every clothing piece] for the actor, and then you need a few for the stunt doubles, maybe. You always need at least six of everything,” Dillon said. So the “Project Hail Mary” costume team had to order more thread and enlist its knitters to “go like the clappers” in order to make new fox specials of Grace’s cardigan. Grace’s many t-shirts had to be vintage-treated on a tight turnaround, too.
“We’ve got this amazing textiles team, led by Tim Shanahan. They’ll create the copies, they’ll make screen-prints in order to recreate the Horseshoe Bend T-Shirt that’s been talked about recently as well,” Dillon said. “We’ve got these amazing artists who can recreate that, treat it, and break it down so it all looks vintage and amazing.”
There’s a sense of the human touch and texture in most of the costumes on “Project Hail Mary,” one that subconsciously reinforces the stakes of everything and everyone that Grace is fighting to save. Project supervisor Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) also rocks a lot of knitted sweaters, visually positioning her away from the Ice Queen/Girlboss cliches the film wants to avoid.
“You could go for the tropes of a steely, cold woman, but one of the things that Phil might have said about her was that she was the cleverest kid in school and a bit weird — because sometimes the cleverest kids are. So it was the idea that she wouldn’t necessarily be all Prada and stuff. She would have an element of comfort to her as well,” Dillon said.
There’s a really welcome aversion to coldness in the costumes, as well as all the other visual elements of “Project Hail Mary.” Dillon and Crossman eschewed bulkier, if more historically accurate, spacesuits, departing from the Andy Weir novel.
They opted instead for a design that is more form-fitting and an unapologetically bold shade of red, both because it’s more conducive to the action sequences in the film and because it just makes Grace look more human. “I think there’s been a fear around such bright colors, but obviously with Phil and Chris doing a lot of their animation work, I think they’re not as scared of primary colors as a lot of people might be,” Dillon said.
Nor were Dillon and Crossman afraid to use color as part of how they show Grace’s character journey over the course of the film. “I think we were interested in the idea that the yellow color at the beginning has this association with cowardliness and that he changes through the film. He ends up being in the white flight suit, at the end, to conquer all his demons,” he added.
What a rare and lucky thing, to be able to conquer one’s demons and sun-eating beings, and still be cozy.
“Project Hail Mary” is now playing in theaters.
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