Ryan Gosling: Why Peter Jackson Fired Me From 'Lovely Bones'

In The Hollywood Reporter's annual actors roundtable discussion, the "Blue Valentine" star says Jackson disapproved of the 60 pounds he'd put on from "melting Haagen Dazs and drinking it."

Ryan Gosling has revealed that he was fired from Peter Jackson's 2009 awards contender "The Lovely Bones" because his 60-pound weight gain did not sit well with the director and his fellow producers.

Gosling said his much-ballyhooed weight gain -- fueled by drinking melted Haagen Dazs ice cream when he was thirsty -- was all a part of how he saw the character of Jack Salmon, the grieving-father role ultimately filled by Mark Wahlberg.

"We had a different idea of how the character should look," Gosling told The Hollywood Reporter. "I really believed he should be 210 pounds."

Jackson disagreed, and dropped Gosling days before production began in 2007.

"We didn't talk very much during the preproduction process, which was the problem," Gosling said. "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."

Jackson's wife and collaborator, Fran Walsh, gave a slightly different version of events to THR a year ago.

"Ryan came to us two or three times and said, 'I'm not the right person for this role. I'm too young,"' she recalled. "And we said, 'No, no, no. We can age you up. We can thin your hair.' We were very keen.

"It wasn't until we were in preproduction and we had the cast there that it became increasingly clear: He was so uncomfortable moving forward, and we began to feel he was not right. It was our blindness, the desire to make it work no matter what."