Ryan Gosling’s ‘Project Hail Mary’ Co-Star Was a Mop

Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s science-fiction caper Project Hail Mary made $80.5 million at the domestic box office last weekend, plus $60.4 million internationally, making it the biggest opening of 2026 so far. How did this non-franchise movie wipe the floor with the competition? With a mop, of course.

In promotional interviews for the film, star Ryan Gosling has replaced shop talk with mop talk: The man is squawking non-stop about mop. In various press-junket clips, Gosling has told the tale of a “mop friend” that Lord and Miller fashioned out of duct tape and glasses for Gosling to shoot with after he requested it on set. His character in the film, Dr. Ryland Grace, is meant to be alone in outer space for a long stretch of time, and as he said in a clip posted by @cinemovietv in February, “One day, when I was feeling very lonely and pretty lost, like I’d scraped the bottom of the barrel of my creativity, I was like, ‘I need a scene partner. I need a friend. I don’t know about today.’” The directors came back to him with “a mop person, and they called her Moppy Ringwald. And I danced with Moppy, and I laughed with Moppy, I had a whole day — this wonderful day with Moppy Ringwald — and it ends up in the film. They’re willing to stop everything that we’ve planned and listen to what I needed.”

In an interview with IMDb, it’s the same story. “I had been working for maybe a hundred days or something alone, and I was kind of needing company, so I said, ‘I want to make a friend out of a mop, and I want to do the scenes today with this mop friend,’” Gosling says. “They made this mop for me that they called Moppy Ringwald, and I got to spend the day … We danced, you know? Not many filmmakers are going to stop everything and make a mop friend for you.”

In an interview with People, Gosling tells the story in near-identical fashion, saying, “There was one time where I felt I had been alone for like a hundred days or something, and I was like, ‘I need someone to talk to. I need a scene partner.’” So Lord and Miller “went and made a mop into a person. They put glasses and a dress, and they called her Moppy Ringwald. And I spent that day dancing and singing and crying with her.”

Moppy Ringwald only makes it into a brief shot of the film “dancing” with Gosling in a montage of Grace going stir-crazy alone on the spaceship. But there are no small roles, only small cleaning implements (feather dusters, for example), and Gosling just can’t seem to get over the mop that got away. At this point, they might as well have called it Project Hail Moppy.