Ryan Gosling is playing Jack Salmon in Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones, an adaptation of the runaway bestseller by Alice Sebold. To portray the grieving father whose murdered daughter watches from heaven, he has already put on some added paunch.

"This is frustrating because I gained weight for Lars And The Real Girl and then I lost it and then I gained a lot of weight again," said Gosling. "So I could have just kept it the whole time."

Gosling is preparing to shoot in Pennsylvania, though he revealed that he will have a bit of work in New Zealand, where Jackson is literally constructing heaven. "I work a little bit in New Zealand, but mostly I work in Philadelphia."

It is too early for Gosling to figure out his acting method; his commitment to character is always evident on film, but he's still working out the details. "It's hard to describe when you are in it. When I'm out of it I'll be able to decipher what's been happening."

He did, however, share an artistic perspective with Jackson. "He's fearless as a director. He takes on things that you kind of have to be crazy to take on. To do Lord of the Rings you have to kind of be nuts because there is no way you are going to win. You are always going to have naysayers and people saying you ruined it or whatever. But he's my kind of nuts because he doesn't care and he does it anyway. There are so many units and it takes him years to make it. He doesn't care. And he makes this movie and then he does King Kong. What are you doing? Now he's doing Lovely Bones. People have such reverence for that book, and he's just like, 'I'm going to try that.' So it's exciting to work with somebody like that."

The Lovely Bones will be in theaters 2008.  Lars And The Real Girl , starring Gosling about a social introvert who befriends a blow-up doll, opens this Friday in limited release.