You may not have seen Priya Kansara in “Project Hail Mary,” but you definitely heard her voice.
The actress stars as Mary, the spaceship’s titular onboard computer, opposite James Ortiz as Rocky and a live-action Ryan Gosling in Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s hit sci-fi adventure. Amid real-life worries concerning AI, she praised the directors for hiring a human actor to bring the ship to life, as opposed to going the artificial route.
“It feels like a scary time for artists as a whole, especially with the rise in use of AI and robotics and the fact that we’ve seen so many jobs be replaced. As an actor, as an artist, I really believe that nothing and no one else can do our jobs,” Kansara told TheWrap. “So the fact that Chris and Phil and the rest of the team prioritized having artists on board and prioritized collaboration, creativity, the story, rather than what would save them a buck or what would be easier was really special. I feel lucky to get to work with people like that, because they understand it, they get it.”
“In terms of how I researched and prepped for the role, something that was really interesting was how Phil and Chris wanted to attack it. There was so much improv to it, but also with the types of responses that they wanted, we kind of wanted it to feel like unintelligent artificial intelligence,” she added. “We didn’t want Mary to be the latest technology. It almost feels as if the Hail Mary ship was built very quickly and they decided that there needs to be this automated voice system on board, so they got somebody in the sound recording studio and got them to record this stuff really last minute, so they didn’t have options for everything. It was also important that she wasn’t overly rehearsed, she wasn’t too empathetic, she wasn’t too knowledgeable, either. So that was really fun to then make her a bit not smart.”
The actress also explained the unique process of performing the role on-set in order to play off Gosling’s Ryland Grace, saying it “makes all the difference.”
“When I first got the script — which is incredible, Drew [Goddard] is an incredible screenplay writer, he did an amazing job — Mary was not called Mary, she was just a computer. Of course, the role is incredibly technical, so when I came on set, the role really expanded, because Phil and Chris and Ryan all play with improv so much. There are literally 40-minute takes somewhere on the cutting room floor,” Kansara recalled. “So Mary evolved as the process went on, and her relationship with Grace also evolved. It helped to build that world. It helped for Ryan as well. For the first third of the film, he’s in the spaceship alone and it was important that he had people to play off him and something to keep him on his toes as well. It was really fun. Basically, I just got to annoy him all day, which was amazing.”
“James is incredibly talented and was also such an incredible scene partner. It was really fun to have an extra person in the scene, which sounds crazy, but for so long it felt like just me and Ryan, and then it was me, Ryan and James. So that was exciting to be like, ‘Oh my God, there’s more people,’” she continued. “We felt that isolation greatly, and it just made for even funnier, even more ridiculous scenarios that played out whilst we were doing all of that. Those are definitely some of my favorite scenes, because Rocky is also just the most adorable character ever.”
Plus, Kansara will be staying in the genre with her next project, Apple TV’s “For All Mankind” spinoff “Star City.”
“I feel like it was a super serendipitous year for me to go from playing Mary and voicing Mary and getting to be on set watching Ryan be this astronaut to then a few months later, me filming space stuff myself and getting to take so much of that learning and then directly implement it,” she said. “Despite both of them revolving around space and being very sci-fi, they’re actually tonally incredibly different. As an actor, I really got to do something different as well, since, obviously, I’m not a voice playing a robot, I’m playing a real person.”
So what does the “Polite Society” star think the future holds for us Earthlings after her back-to-back trips to space?
“With the way in which everything is going on in the world right now, it feels almost naive to say that it feels like it’s going to be better. I’ve been seeing a lot
of memes and things online about how if Rocky had come to Earth, we probably wouldn’t have treated him, how the Eridians treated Grace. When you think about that truth, it’s incredibly sad,” Kansara shared. “The thing that I love the most about ‘Hail Mary’ and what I loved the most about the book, is that sci-fi is often written from quite a dark place: The aliens are coming to get us, they’re going to kill us, they’re going to grow inside of us. But Andy Weir writes from such a place of hope and positivity: No, what if we met the Eridians and we could befriend them? What if we saw past our differences? What if we were able to collectively do something incredible, both for us and for them, and what a wonderful universe that could look like.”
“Not a lot of people talk like that, and I hope that this film encourages people to think in a more positive way and encourages people to remember that we are more than our differences,” she concluded. “We can improve our world if we actually treated things with curiosity and not with fear.”
“Project Hail Mary” is now playing in theaters, while “Star City” premieres May 29 on Apple TV.
