It has been hailed as a rare film the whole family can enjoy together. Project Hail Mary - the new science fiction adventure based on the novel by best-selling author Andy Weir, who previously gave us The Martian - offers content that is safe for children to watch plus a gripping and intelligent story to keep the grown-ups entertained too.

No wonder it's become 2026's biggest box office debut, taking $140.9million (£122million) shortly after opening.

Ryan Gosling, the film's star and one of its co-producers, says Project Hail Mary's broad appeal is what drew him to the project in the first place. "My family struggle to find movies we can go and see as a family," he explains.

The Canadian is happily partnered with Cuban-American actress Eva Mendes, whom he met when they co-starred in the 2012 crime thriller The Place Beyond The Pines, and with whom he shares daughters, Esmeralda, 11, and Amada, nine.

The celebrity couple have made a pact to give their girls as normal and low-key a life as they possibly can. So much so that in 2020 when Andy Weir sent Ryan the manuscript of the as-yet-unpublished novel with a suggestion of his starring in the film, he did not hesitate to say yes, both as actor and co-producer too.

"I think we all have films that we remember where we were when we saw them, and what they meant to us about the time we were in when we saw them," he says today. "You look for creating those core memory moments from the theatre that I think we all had as kids. And this had all the potential to be one of those. I just needed not to mess it up!"

Project Hail Mary is the tale of Ryland Grace, a bespectacled molecular biologist turned high school science teacher, who awakes from a coma to find himself alone in a space ship hurtling towards an unknown destination. Gradually, he learns that life on Earth is being threatened by the gradual dimming of the sun, and that he has been sent into space on the star ship Hail Mary - so called after the American expression Hail Mary attempt, for a desperate last ditch effort - to try to save our planet.

How he faces this situation - and along the way forms an unlikely friendship with a five-legged space alien apparently made out of rock - is the basis for this intense, nail-biting, and, ultimately, surprisingly heart-warming film.

"It's the adventure of a lifetime, and at the same time, it's a reminder of what we're all capable of as humans," Ryan remarks. "Look - you go to another galaxy, you make an alien best friend, you save the world. It's not bad for a Friday night!"

Ryan, who became a child actor aged 12 when he joined Disney's The Mickey Mouse Club alongside Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, has successfully straddled films genres since his adult breakthrough in 2000's biographical sports drama Remember the Titans starring Denzel Washington. He's done romance (The Notebook, Blue Valentine, Barbie), sci-fi dystopia (Blade Runner 2049), neo-noir thrillers (Drive), and action/comedies (Lars and the Real Girl, The Big Short, The Fall Guy).

Still, he admits that, as actors go, he would not be the obvious first choice to play a scientist or, for that matter, any sort of academic. "I didn't graduate high school, so that might give you a clue!" he says. "I was not good in most subjects, so in this film I was excited to play the kind of teacher I'd wanted to have, because I did struggle myself."

As a child, Ryan struggled with dyslexia and ADHD. He was bullied and got into fights with other pupils at school. When he was 10, his mother, Donna, took him out and homeschooled him. He's previously said: "I hated being a kid. I didn't like being told what to do, I didn't like my body, I didn't like any of it."

Today, things couldn't be more different. "And I want to give a huge shout-out to my daughter here who when I was playing around with the costumes, saw me in glasses and said, 'You look smarter in glasses'," he chuckles. I said, 'Thank you very much, I will take note of that!'"

As much as Ryan struggled at school, there was one teacher above all the others who inspired him.

"I won't mention her name because she might not want to be dragged into all of this, but she really had a big impact on me," he says. "She set this reading goal, where the person in the class who read the most books could take a ride in her Jeep, and the person who read the second most books got a New Kids On The Block CD. I didn't get the Jeep ride, but I did get the CD, which was what I'd really wanted all along. She really made a difference to my life and at the end of the year, when she left, I'd just seen Dead Poets Society, so I decided to do that thing from it."

He smiles, remembering the 1989 private school-set classic, starring Robin Williams as an eccentric teacher who schools his pupils in nineteenth-century poetry while having them stand on their desks to look at the world in a different way.

"So I stood on my desk and said, 'Oh, Captain, my Captain'. A reference that none of the other students got and I'm not sure that she got, either."

Nevertheless, his memories of his unnamed mentor remain of the fondest. "She taught me the power of a good teacher. And in this film, it was an honour to make something where teachers are the heroes because, of course, they are."

He admits that in many ways, this was a tough film to shoot. For one thing, almost immediately after he had signed on to the project, Covid hit. "Here I was getting this opportunity to make the most epic theatrical experience of my life, and theatres were closed," he sighs. For another, just as his character spent most of his time locked alone in a spaceship, so Ryan spent what felt like endless days and weeks all alone on the set with no other human actor to work with. And that, he says gratefully, is where the film's directors Philip Lord and Christopher Miller - known for such subversive blockbusters as The Lego Movie and The Spider Man franchise - came to the rescue.

"There's a lot of talk about me being alone in the film, and in many ways, I was. I remember one day when I was feeling very lonely and pretty lost and like I'd scraped the barrel of my creativity, and I was like, 'I don't know about today. I need a scene partner. I need a friend'. So, now, Chris was off in another set, but before I had stopped talking, Phil had pulled out a roll of duct tape, which he always has for some reason, and he went and found Chris and they found a mop and they made me a mop person to keep me company! They called her Moppy Ringwald, and that whole day I hung out with Moppy and I danced with Moppy and I laughed with Moppy. I just had this wonderful day with Moppy Ringwald. And some of that ends up in the film because that's the kind of filmmakers they are!"

Halfway through the film Ryland finally finds a companion. He encounters an alien - a fantastical creature who appears to be part spider, part rock, with whom he strikes up an unlikely, but profound, friendship.

Ryan says now that this was as much of a relief to him as an actor as it was to his character: "I was alone on camera for many months, so once we got to the Rocky portion, I was very relieved to have company. Like everything with this film, it mirrored the story." Ask him what it was like to act with this strange character, and he laughs.

"Let's be honest, Rocky is a bit of a diva," he says. "He's very high maintenance, and requires a lot of attention. He has a whole glam team we call the Rocketeers. It's a whole thing."

He adds that the secret of Rocky's emerging humanity is that the creature is not simply a collection of special effects but an impressively lifelike physical puppet operated by puppeteer and performer James Ortiz.

"We knew James was special when he came into the audition," says Ryan. "There was a Rocky puppet in the room that other people had been using, but James pushed the puppet aside and began to act like he was Rocky, and we were, like, oh, yeah, that's him. He started to say lines to me in character and after a while - because he has such a deep connection to Rocky - he would say things like, 'Rocky would say this', and 'Rocky would never do that'. And this movie owes James a lot because, like Rocky, he just came out of nowhere and became this key ingredient to the magic of the film."

Down on earth, Ryland does have one more conventional contact in the person of harried team leader Eva Stratt, played by Germany's Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest). She is a stern and unbending character, who suddenly reveals a more human side when she enters into a trans-universe karaoke session with Ryan featuring Harry Styles' song Sign of the Times. This scene, says Ryan, was just another of the little serendipitous pieces the movie picked up along the way.

"We were shooting on an aircraft carrier," he says, "and our dressing rooms were down the corridor from each other. And I was sitting there one day and I heard the voice of an angel coming down the corridor. Really - it was like the heavens pouring honey in my ear. I followed it down and it's Sandra singing. I said, 'You can sing like that?' She was like, 'Ah, you know'. I said, 'Will you please sing in the movie?' So we wrote the scene, and it ended up being one of the best scenes in the film." Just another piece of Project Hail Mary magic.