Peter Jackson has addressed the decision to replace Ryan Gosling from his film version of The Lovely Bones.
The adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel was released in 2009, with Gosling originally cast in the role of Jack Salmon. However, he was eventually dropped from the film and replaced by Mark Wahlberg, Gosling claiming at the time that he put on four stone without the director’s approval.
Opening up about the saga at the Cannes Film Festival, Jackson explained (via Entertainment Weekly): “I won’t talk about any particular examples of actors because it’s a personal, private thing and it’s not their fault.
“Anytime we recast an actor, it’s actually our fault because we didn’t get the casting right and we cast the wrong person for a role. It’s not because they did anything wrong. So, I’m not going to talk about individuals, but you just got to realise that what you were imagining isn’t really quite happening, which means that we got it wrong and so we take full responsibility.”
The director went on to call Gosling a “fantastic actor”, continuing: “Films are a chemistry both on camera and behind the camera. They’re chemistry in terms of what the actor conveys to the audience of the film.
“It’s just a complicated sort of amalgam of communication of how somebody gels into a group of people, into a story, into a character. It’s complicated and usually you try very hard when you’re planning the film, casting it, trying to get that gel kind of right, but occasionally we make our own mistakes.”
Speaking back in 2010 about the recasting, Gosling claimed to The Hollywood Reporter that he and Jackson “had a different idea of how the character should look”.
“We didn’t talk very much during the preproduction process, which was the problem,” he added. “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.”
Fran Walsh, who co-wrote and co-produced The Lovely Bones and is Jackson’s wife, told The Hollywood Reporter before that: “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.”
Meanwhile, lead star Saoirse Ronan said in 2024 that she was “sad” that Gosling was sacked from the film, telling the Happy Sad Confused podcast: “I think the reasons why they parted were totally valid, and I’ve spoken to both [Gosling and Jackson] now and it happens. Do you know what I mean? It it’s not personal, necessarily. It’s like sometimes you’re just not on the same page.”
In other news, Jackson – who made his name directing The Lord Of The Rings and Hobbit trilogies – has revealed that he is in talks to adapt more works from author J.R.R. Tolkien, including The Silmarillion. The director has also shared an anecdote of a delivery driver who told him The Hobbit movies were “crap”.