Peter Jackson Takes Full Blame for Firing Ryan Gosling From ‘The Lovely Bones’ Almost Two Decades Later

‘The Lovely Bones’ has always occupied a curious corner of Peter Jackson’s filmography. The 2009 supernatural drama, based on Alice Sebold’s novel, starred Saoirse Ronan as a murdered teenager who watches over her family from the afterlife, a premise that gave the film a haunting emotional weight from the page to the screen. It remains one of Jackson’s most ambitious and divisive productions, and now, years later, a fresh piece of its behind-the-scenes history is finally getting an airing.

Gosling was originally cast as the father of Ronan’s lead character, a role that would have marked a significant escalation in scale for the actor at the time. The part of Jack Salmon, a father consumed by grief and guilt, seemed tailor-made for the kind of raw, emotionally exposed work Gosling had already shown he was capable of delivering.

What unraveled that opportunity has since hardened into one of the stranger casting stories Hollywood has produced. Gosling revealed in a 2010 conversation with The Hollywood Reporter that he felt his character should weigh roughly 210 pounds to look the part of a distressed parent, and to reach that target, he famously took to melting Haagen-Dazs ice cream and drinking it whenever he was thirsty. Jackson disagreed with the transformation and dropped Gosling from the project just days before production began.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in 2010, Gosling explained that the disconnect pointed to a deeper problem around creative communication during preproduction. “We didn’t talk very much during the preproduction process, which was the problem,” he said. “I just showed up on set and I had gotten it wrong. Then I was fat and unemployed.” The role ultimately went to Mark Wahlberg, who stepped in and completed the film alongside Ronan and Rachel Weisz.

Nearly two decades on, Jackson finally addressed the recasting directly during a career retrospective at the Cannes Film Festival, where he was careful to avoid naming Gosling personally while making clear that such decisions reflect a filmmaking mistake rather than any fault of the actor involved. He called Gosling a fantastic actor and described the chemistry required between a performer and a production as a complicated and often unpredictable thing to get right before cameras roll. Jackson’s statement, picked up by Variety, placed responsibility squarely on himself and his team rather than on any individual cast member.

Saoirse Ronan weighed in on the story during a 2024 appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, telling Variety that she had been sad when Gosling was let go after the two had already spent time together in early preparations for the film. She described the parting as “totally valid” while insisting it was never personal, noting that she had spoken to both men since and that sometimes people simply are not on the same creative page. Ronan added that Wahlberg brought a lived quality to the role given that he was already a father himself when he came aboard.

The firing did not slow Gosling down for long, as he went on to build one of the most celebrated careers of his generation, with standout turns in ‘Blue Valentine,’ ‘Drive,’ ‘La La Land,’ and ‘Barbie.’ Jackson’s gracious public statement at Cannes closes a loop that has been open for years, and it raises a question worth putting to fans of both men: if Gosling’s 210-pound vision of Jack Salmon had ever made it to screen, do you think it would have changed how ‘The Lovely Bones’ was received?