According to Saoirse Ronan, it was sad that Mark Wahlberg got the role in ‘The Lovely Bones’ instead of Ryan Gosling.
“I think I just loved Ryan. And his dog, George, and I was just sad that, you know, he wasn’t going to be around,” the actress told host Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.
Ronan added, “I’ve spoken to both [Gosling and Jackson] now and it happens. Do you know what I mean? It’s not personal, necessarily. It’s like sometimes you’re just not on the same page.”
“Mark was able to step in, and he was a father. He was a father to, like, I don’t know, three kids? He probably had an experience of that that Ryan felt he didn’t. Ryan was like 27. He was young,” she continued.
The actress starred with Wahlberg in the 2009 film directed by Peter Jackson. The movie is about Ronan’s character, a young girl who is murdered and watches over her family and her killer from purgatory while they try to heal. Wahlberg played her grieving father after Gosling was let go from the role.
Gosling said in a 2010 interview with The Hollywood Reporter that he was fired from ‘The Lovely Bones’ because of issues with Jackson. The actor explained, “[He] had a different idea of how the character should look. I really believed he should be 210 pounds.”
But the director disagreed and ended up dropping Gosling just a few days before production started in 2007. “We didn’t talk very much during the preproduction process, which was the problem,” Ryan said at the time. “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.”
Ronan later told Horowitz that it was ‘great’ to work with Gosling again while filming their 2014 movie ‘Lost River.’ She added that he is still the same and hasn’t changed.
