In the summer of 2020, when a fresh iteration of The Wolf Man was first revealed to be in the works, the project didn’t have a director attached, but it did have a star lined up. While pitches were still being taken for who would helm the film, it was announced that Ryan Gosling was going to play the lead – the actor evidently excited to undergo one of cinema’s classic transformations. Unfortunately, the extended development of the movie ultimately took its toll, and Gosling was eventually replaced with Christopher Abbott (who audiences can see on the big screen this weekend), but if you’re like me, you’re curious: what would the Ryan Gosling version of Wolf Man have looked like, and how different would it have been?
I brought that specific curiosity with me to the Wolf Man press day earlier this month in Los Angeles, where I had the chance to interview director Leigh Whannell. I asked about Gosling’s original involvement and how much the movie changed with the recasting, and the filmmaker explained that his vision for the film stayed consistent through the shakeup – which was not due to any of creative differences but instead just scheduling complications. Said Whannell,
No, it's the pretty much the same thing. It was really, you know... when I was working with Ryan, it was the similar story that you see now. It was the isolation, the same characters. It's just that so much time went by, there was these strikes and all this stuff happened. All of a sudden Ryan's schedule changed. But I'm happy we got Christopher Abbott. He is so great in the role. I think he brought this to life better than I could have hoped for.
When it was reported by Variety in 2020 that Ryan Gosling was going to star in Wolf Man, the trade noted that the actor had pitched the film and that there was an existing script by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo that was described as being “in the vein of Jake Gyllenhaal’s thriller Nightcrawler.” That screenplay apparently went by the wayside when Leigh Whannell came aboard in July 2020 with a pitch of his own. It wasn’t until December 2023 that Christopher Abbott’s casting was announced and an official logline revealed that the plot would involve “a man whose family is being terrorized by a lethal predator.”
In addition to Leigh Whannell’s idea for the story remaining intact, there was also carryover from the character development work that the filmmaker did with Ryan Gosling. I asked how the personality of Blake, Wolf Man’s protagonist, evolved with a new actor playing the role, and the director explained that work with Christopher Abbott picked up where things left off with the Barbie star:
Not really. It's interesting. The core of what I was working on with Ryan is what stayed throughout the whole thing. Of course we would tweak it a little bit, and Chris had his own ideas, but the core of it was the same.
In the film, Christopher Abbott’s Blake is a married father who gets word that his dad has been declared dead after being missing for a number of years. In hopes of reconnecting with his wife (Julia Garner) and spending a fun summer with his daughter (Matilda Firth), a plan is made to travel to Blake’s childhood home, which is embedded in the Oregon wilderness, but everything goes to hell when the trio is set upon by a feral creature.
Wolf Man arrives in theaters this Friday, January 17, and be sure to stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for more from my interview with Leigh Whannell.
