Saoirse Ronan said she was “sad” when Ryan Gosling was dropped from the movie The Lovely Bones.
The actress ended up starring alongside Mark Wahlberg in the Peter Jackson-helmed 2009 film, which followed Ronan’s character, a young girl who was murdered and watches over her family and her killer from purgatory, as her loved ones struggle to heal. Wahlberg played her grieving father after Gosling was fired.
The Lady Bird star recently told host Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that while she didn’t get to film with Gosling at the time, they had “done some prep” prior to production starting. “I think I just loved Ryan. And his dog, Georgem and I was just sad that, you know, he wasn’t going to be around,” she said.
However, Ronan thought the reasons why the Barbie star and the director parted ways were “totally valid.” She added, “I’ve spoken to both [Gosling and Jackson] now and it happens. Do you know what I mean? It’s not personal, necessarily. It’s like sometimes you’re just not on the same page.”
She continued: “Mark was able to step in, and he was a father. He was a father to, like, I don’t know, three kids? He probably had an experience of that that Ryan felt he didn’t. Ryan was like 27. He was young.”
The Fall Guy actor previously told The Hollywood Reporter in 2010 that he was fired from The Lovely Bones because he and Jackson “had a different idea of how the character should look. I really believed he should be 210 pounds.”
But the director disagreed and ultimately dropped Gosling just days before production began in 2007.
“We didn’t talk very much during the preproduction process, which was the problem,” Gosling explained at the time. “It was a huge movie, and there’s so many things to deal with, and he couldn’t deal with the actors individually. I just showed up on set, and I had gotten it wrong. Then I was fat and unemployed.”
Ronan later told Horowitz that it was “great” to work with Gosling later while filming their 2014 film Lost River. She added, “And, again, he’s just, like, the same. He doesn’t change.”
