Gosling was dropped just days before production
Ryan Gosling claims he was fired from a movie because he gained too much weight for the role.
The 2009 film in question was a Peter Jackson led production based on Alice Sebold’s novel.
It follows 14-year-old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), who is murdered by her neighbour, George Harvey (Stanley Tucci).
In the afterlife, Susie watches over her grieving parents Jack (Mark Wahlberg) and Abigail (Rachel Weisz), as they struggle to cope with her death.
Susie seeks justice while still coming to terms with her new existence.
Titled The Lovely Bones, you can take a look at the trailer below:
Although Wahlberg starred as Susie’s father Jack, it was Gosling who was supposed to take on that role before he was dropped days before production in 2007.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2010, the Barbie star said he and Jackson ‘had a different idea of how the character should look’,
Gosling, who put on 60 pounds, said: “I really believed he should be 210 pounds.
“We didn’t talk very much during the preproduction process, which was the problem.
“It was a huge movie, and there’s so many things to deal with, and he couldn’t deal with the actors individually.
Gosling in 2007 (Bryan Bedder/Getty Images)
“I just showed up on set, and I had gotten it wrong.
“Then I was fat and unemployed.”
Meanwhile, the director’s wife Fran Walsh said to the outlet in 2009: “Ryan came to us two or three times and said, ‘I’m not the right person for this role. I’m too young’.
“And we said, ‘No, no, no. We can age you up. We can thin your hair.’ We were very keen.
“It wasn’t until we were in preproduction and we had the cast there that it became increasingly clear: He was so uncomfortable moving forward, and we began to feel he was not right.
“It was our blindness, the desire to make it work no matter what.”
Gosling at The Fall Guy premiere earlier this year (Phillip Faraone/WireImage)
Whatever the reason, it turns out that Gosling’s weight gain was not a complete waste of time.
Austin Butler said he used the Gosling’s fast pound packing technique to play the older version of Elvis Presley in the Bay Luhrmann film.
He told Variety: “I heard that Ryan Gosling when he was going to do The Lovely Bones, had microwaved Häagen-Dazs [ice cream] and would drink it.
“So I started doing that. I would go get two dozen doughnuts and eat them all.
“I really started to pack on some pounds.
“It’s fun for a week, and then you feel awful about yourself.”
Featured Image Credit: Reddit / (Photo by Sonia Recchia/Getty Images)
