For years, Hollywood has been circling one juicy little rumour: Ryan Gosling got booted from The Lovely Bones because of a 60-pound weight gain.
Sounds dramatic, right? Well, Peter Jackson is finally saying… not so fast.
The Lord of the Rings mastermind has addressed the long-running chatter about 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 one single issue.
“I won’t talk about any particular examples of actors because it’s a personal, private thing and it’s not their fault,” he said.
“Anytime we recast an actor, it’s actually our fault because we didn’t get the casting right and we cast the wrong person for a role. It’s not because they did anything wrong.”
He added that casting is less “precision science” and more chaotic chemistry experiment.
“Films are a chemistry both on camera and behind the camera… It’s just a complicated sort of amalgam of communication of how somebody gels into a group of people, into a story, into a character.”
In short: sometimes it just does not click.
Gosling himself previously admitted things were not exactly smooth behind the scenes.
Earlier in an interview, he revealed he gained weight for the role, believing the character should be heavier.
“We had a different idea of how the character should look,” he said. “I really believed he should be 210 pounds.”
But he also hinted the real issue went deeper than appearances.
“We didn’t talk very much during the preproduction process, which was the problem… I just showed up on set, and I had gotten it wrong.”
And just like that, what looked like a Hollywood “firing scandal” turns out to be the most expensive miscommunication ever involving Häagen-Dazs and creative differences.
