Ryan Gosling, Sandra Huller address romantic tension in Project Hail Mary

Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, and Andy Weir weigh in on whether there's a hint of romantic feeling between Ryland Grace and Eva Stratt

To be fully clear, whatever emotions we’re seeing on screen are up to personal interpretation. Grace and Stratt don’t kiss or confess any secret affections, let alone go further. Anything viewers may infer about what’s going on between them just comes from the warm, tender way they look at each other, both in private conversations and in a scene where Stratt performs Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times” at a farewell karaoke party between them, while Grace beams at her adoringly.

But the stars and writer make it clear that no, they didn’t intend to suggest a star-crossed romance for Grace and Stratt.

“I think he just has so much respect for her,” Gosling tells Polygon. “And I think it's like, they love each other's brains. It’s a really interesting, beautiful dynamic that I haven't really seen before [in a movie] in this way.”

Gosling says there might have been some potential for a connection between them, if they’d met under completely different circumstances.

“It may be in another time — when the world wasn't ending, and they were able to form bonds on Earth, it might've been different,” he says. “But it didn't have to even be that, because they just have this love for each other's brains.”

It’s easy to see their relationship as low-key romantic in the movie solely because the film is largely centered on Grace, the protagonist. That means we rarely see Stratt unless she’s with him — which in turn makes it seem like she voluntarily spends more time with him than with other people while carrying out her worldwide duties.

But author Andy Weir, who wrote the novel Project Hail Mary, is blunt about any emotional interpretation of their relationship.

“I never had any intention for them to have any romantic feelings for each other whatsoever,” he tells Polygon. “If there's any subtext to that in the film, it was not my doing. In the book, Ava cared about Ryland as a person, respected him to a certain degree, as much as she respects anyone, and cared about him. She felt bad about how things went at the end, and was maybe even a little protective of him, but it was never a romantic interest.”

Like Gosling, Hüller feels the two characters might have had potential for romance if their circumstances had been different.

“I think they like each other very much, although they're very different from each other,” she says. “The respect for each other probably could, if they would spend more time together, turn into whatever, nobody knows. But I think their professional way of dealing with things would never allow any sort of interaction in that way.”

At the same time, she says, her interpretation of Stratt was always that the character had a spouse and children that simply aren’t relevant to the story.

“I think she has a family. I don't think she's alone,” Hüller says. “There is one moment where Ryland Grace is asking her if it's not a lonely job, and she says, ‘I'm not lonely.’ And I believe that she's not.”

Hüller ultimately feels that any touch of romantic tension between the characters would make the story less interesting.

“To me personally, when I see films like this and there has to be a romantic story in it, I'm a bit bored,” she says. “Because why? Not everybody who's working together falls in love. I love that they are companions in this, and that they respect each other in their different ways of dealing with things. To me, that’s the biggest thing that can happen.”

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Project Hail Mary is in theaters now.