For years, Hollywood has revolved around a juicy little rumor: Ryan Gosling was booted The lovely Bones due to a 60 pound weight gain.
Sounds dramatic, right? Well, Peter Jackson is finally saying…not so fast.
The Lord of the Rings mastermind has spoken about the long-running talk of Gosling losing the role of grieving father Jack in the 2009 drama, a part that eventually went to Mark Wahlberg alongside Saoirse Ronan and Rachel Weisz.
Speaking at Cannes, Jackson pushed back on the idea that it was ever about a single issue.
“I don’t want to talk about any specific examples of actors because it’s a personal, private thing and it’s not their fault,” he said.
“Every time we recast an actor, it’s actually our fault because we didn’t get the right casting and we cast the wrong person in a role. It’s not because they did anything wrong.”
He added that casting is less “exact science” and more chaotic chemistry experiment.
“Film is a chemistry both on camera and behind the camera… It’s just a complicated form of communication of how someone turns into a group of people, into a story, into a character.”
In short: sometimes it just doesn’t click.
Gosling himself has previously admitted that things weren’t exactly smooth sailing behind the scenes.
Earlier in an interview, he revealed that he gained weight for the role, believing that the character should be heavier.
“We had a different idea of what the character should look like,” he said. “I really believed he was going to be 210 pounds.”
But he also suggested that the real problem went deeper than meets the eye.
“We didn’t talk very much during the pre-production process, which was the problem … I just showed up on set and I was wrong.”
And just like that, what looked like a Hollywood “firing scandal” turns out to be the costliest miscommunication ever involving Häagen-Dazs and creative differences.
