Project Hail Mary, James Ortiz Interview

"It's a big, beautiful, crazy collaboration between 75 animators, five puppeteers, a massive design team led by Neal Scanlan, and then me. My job is to sort of be the soul in the room for Ryan to play against and to translate all of the beautiful work that the animators are doing into a physical performance in the space. 

Ryan is a dream. He's so generous and so funny and so kind, and he really treated me like a scene partner, which is the best thing you can ask for when you're playing a five-legged spider alien. We just had a ball. We found the character together. 

It was a really, really special experience. I think it's a story about how we're better together. It's a story about friendship and how, when things are at their most dire, the best thing we can do is reach out to someone who's different than us and find a way to communicate. It's a really hopeful, beautiful, funny movie. It's a total original. You've never seen anything like it. It's a massive sci-fi epic, but it's also a tiny, intimate buddy comedy. It's got everything."

James Ortiz plays Dr. Dimitri Komorov, the third member of the Hail Mary mission crew alongside Ryland Grace and Yáo Li-Jie. Komorov is an expert scientist who is part of the original team destined to save humanity. Like Yáo, his character appears primarily in flashbacks, revealing the complete composition of the crew before the events that leave Grace as the sole survivor upon awakening.