2026 has been a great year for movies across all genres. For instance, sci-fi fans were treated to Phil Lord and Chris Miller's book to screen adaptation of Project Hail Mary, which was a wild box office success. Ryan Gosling's performance as Ryland Grace was universally acclaimed, but it turns out that playing the role opposite a fictional alien was challenging. Luckily the great Julia Roberts helped him as he acted in the film alone.Reviews of Project Hail Mary praised Gosling's multilayered performance in the film (which is streaming with an Amazon Prime subscription), but he had to do a ton of acting without a scene partner. During a recent Q& A about the movie (via IndieWire), the Barbie actor spoke about how challenging his role was. As he put it: I had been acting for a long time on the film, and gone through a lot of incarnations of the character, and really felt like I had tried everything I could think of. I had been in a placenta onesie. I looked like a space caveman. I acted like I was born. I acted like I didn’t know how to talk. I was a toddler. I was a man. And by the end of it, we got to this very expensive set, which was all these LED screens we had been waiting for to be built. We invested a lot of money in that, and it was very visually beautiful and fancy and high-tech. But I was just so tired of acting alone.This makes a great deal of sense. Ryland's story in Project Hail Mary is told across multiple years, with the story pivoting from him alone in space and flashbacks to his time on Earth. It required Ryan Gosling bring lots of different layers to the character, and he had the added challenge of having tons of scenes opposite the scene-stealing alien Rocky.While there was a puppet Rocky on set, it apparently had some struggles. In fact, Gosling compared it to the infamous breaking Jaws shark. While filming Project Hail Mary he went outside for air and met Julia Roberts. As he put it: I’d never met her, and she sat down and talked to me. She was talking about how much fun she was having on her set with Luca Guadagnino on ‘After the Hunt.’ She said, ‘You should come over,’ and I needed human interaction. So I went down to the set, and they were shooting a party scene, and they were all drinking and having fun, and they seemed like they were having a great time.Clearly the isolation was getting to the La La Land actor, and it sounds like the After the Hunt set was a much-needed change of pace full of fellow actors to interact with. Julia Roberts didn't already have a friendship with Gosling, but she immediately invited him to set in order to give him the boost in morale that he so needed in the midst of filming.But Roberts didn't stop there. She helped to find another solution to Gosling's sense of loneliness in the science-fiction movie's set. Namely by creating a new puppet for him to act opposite. In his words: I said, ‘I want a friend, I want someone to act with.' They were like, ‘OK, but what do we do?’ And I said, ‘I want to get a mop, and I want to make it into a person and talk to it.’ And they stopped everything on our fancy, expensive day, and crawled around the sets looking for tape and glasses, and a dress. And they helped me build this mop lady for me to do scenes with, who we called Moppy Ringwald.Oh, to be a fly on the wall. I'd give anything to see what Moppy Ringwald looked like, especially in juxtaposition to the high-tech set of Project Hail Mary. If Gosling ends up snatching some trophies for his performance during Awards Season, I hope that both Julia and Moppy get their flowers during his acceptance speeches. Perhaps there's even a photo of the cleaning tool-turned co-star to be shared. Fingers crossed.Project Hail Mary is streaming on Amazon as part of the 2026 movie release list. We'll just have to see if Ryan Gosling actually ends up getting nominated for major acting awards like the Oscars. After all, the movie was universally acclaimed and made a ton of money at the box office.