As Rocky, Project Hail Mary’s James Ortiz Helped Save the Universe — and Hollywood

Them’s Person of the Year, awarded in conjunction with Out magazine’s annual Out100 list, honors a cultural figure with a distinctly queer influence — not just an LGBTQ+ person who made a big impact, but one whose work crossed genres, mediums, or boundaries in an extraordinary way.Our inaugural Person of the Year is James Ortiz, the queer puppeteer and actor behind Project Hail Mary’s Rocky.James Ortiz is an easy cry — which can be tough when you’re puppeteering and voicing Rocky, the alien co-star of Project Hail Mary who’s only able to communicate through a combination of limb gestures and translation software. There were moments on set, Ortiz tells Them, when Ryan Gosling, as Dr. Ryland Grace, would be acting opposite the puppet, and “I would just burst into tears.”“They were like, ‘Hey, I don’t think Rocky should be crying,’” Ortiz recalls. “I was like, ‘I know.’”It’s clear that Ortiz — Them’s inaugural Person of the Year and a member of our sister publication’s Out100 list — is deeply connected to the character. So are audiences. The film was the first bona fide theatrical sensation of 2026, helping to rescue a struggling box office at an uncertain time for Hollywood. After the disappointments of 2025, which landed far short of projections due in part to Marvel fatigue and a tilt toward streaming, Project Hail Mary rocketed the industry to its best first quarter since the pandemic and kickstarted a badly needed recovery. The movie itself garnered a worldwide total of over $684 million — a remarkable achievement for a non-franchise, non-superhero film based on an unabashedly nerdy sci-fi novel. But those numbers and milestones were too surreal to really affect Ortiz. “Those are things that happen near you, you know what I mean? It’s not really happening to you,” he says.What did make its way into the 42-year-old’s heart was the deluge of messages he started receiving from “everybody and their mother and p