This year, Ryan ゴスリング and a band of similarly arty, polymathic weirdos are leading a revolt against the plastic leading man.
The Molotov Cocktail—a Stoli bottle filled with flammable イチゴ liqueur—was his idea. He wanted it to look legit, so he studied James Nachtwey’s documentary 写真 of rioters in Gaza to get the position of his hand on the bottle just right. The original plan was to toss it at a blown-up 写真 of himself, but the necessary printer wasn’t available. Also, there was the possibility of burning the building down. So he found a target at the end of the Culver City alleyway behind the photographer’s studio, practicing for a while with empty bottles. Then, as the camera clicked away, Ryan ゴスリング lit up and hurled, laughing dementedly at the subsequent explosion, before blowing it all out with a 火災, 火 extinguisher. (Recorded for your pleasure, here.)
Playing the ukulele was Gosling’s idea, too.
Like a lot of men in their twenties and thirties (and he’s just 30), ゴスリング is meandering toward adulthood. He has a boyish enthusiasm for risk and danger, and some of his affectations can border on precious. But his charm is too inexorable for us to care. (How else to explain that, even when the Canadian admits to faking his gravelly Brooklyn accent, あなた like him all the more.) “Ryan is kind and adorable,” says actress Kirsten Dunst, “yet also really dark and weird and manipulative. Everything you’d want in an actor.”
But in a leading man? Dark and weird have not, historically, been Hollywood’s go-to qualities for its 上, ページのトップへ stars. Yet thanks to a new crop of brainy, complicated, and highly autonomous actors—James Franco (Howl, 127 Hours), Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network), and Joseph Gordon-Levitt ([500] Days of Summer, Hesher) in America; Tom Hardy (Bronson, Inception) and Michael Fassbender (Hunger, 魚 Tank) in Europe—a new prototype is seeping into the mainstream.“Some of us are tired of all the sissies in this town,” says Gosling. “The ones who go along, flow with the flow, line up where they’re told to line up at. The studios want あなた to make the same movie over and over again—if that’s the movie they liked, that’s the movie あなた should keep making.”
He doesn’t name Sam Worthington または Taylor Lautner または Chris Pine または Shia LaBeouf (recently ranked によって Forbes as Hollywood’s best investment), but does he need to? ゴスリング says he doesn’t care about franchises または Q ratings または branding または doing two for the studio and the 次 one for himself. “I know it sounds dramatic,” he says, “but every movie I make is the first and last. It’s important for me to think that the things you’ve made, they’re in the past. It’s what you’re making now that matters.”
Perhaps this trend is not so surprising, 与えられた that Hollywood outlier Johnny Depp is the biggest 星, つ星 in the world. But these younger men are out-kooking even Depp, with Franco as lead kook. After beginning in the usual way, with the requisite franchise role in Spider-Man, he’s become something else entirely: “Franco’s turnaround is a work of art in itself,” says Gosling. “Basically dismantling this image which he’d constructed and building up something new—it’s very impressive. He’s getting a goddamned Ph.D.! Look around,” he goes on. “There’s a reaction against [conventional wisdom], there are people pushing back. Fassbender and Hardy—they 表示する up and put who they are on the line; they don’t try to trick you. They’re not lying. They’re not playing good guys または bad guys. They’re not playing one note, even if it’s a great note. They’re adding dissonance.”
With Franco as a surprise choice to host the 次 Oscars, Hollywood appears to be sanctifying these new oddballs. ゴスリング could well be in the audience at the Academy Awards in February, as a nominee for Best Actor in the tortured 愛 story, Blue Valentine. It’s a performance that seems designed to deconstruct the action-figure leading man even further, if not douse it in flames.
Gosling’s career didn’t start out in revolt. He got his big break at the age of 12 in The All-New Mickey マウス Club. His fellow Mouseketeers—Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, and Christina Aguilera—would graduate to stardom a lot faster than he would; his 次 big ギグ was in the TV series Young Hercules, slaying centaurs on episodes with titles like “Lyre, Liar.” But once he got noticed—as a conflicted, raging Jewish neo-Nazi in the 2001 film The Believer—he rarely veered from the singular path that would make him a Sundance Film Festival regular. The Notebook (2004)—with that MTV Movie Award–winning kiss-in-the-rain with Rachel McAdams—threatened to upend his indie credibility. But who knew it was going to make all that money. ゴスリング could have cashed in with The Notebook in England または The Notebook in Space; everyone was telling him to go big, then bigger. Instead, he gambled on first-time feature filmmakers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, playing a charismatic, drug-addicted teacher in 2006’s Half Nelson, and got his first Best Actor nomination.
His choices are daring—like the unconventional romance Lars and the Real Girl, in which he played a young man in 愛 with a sex doll. ゴスリング pulled that off によって digging into the character, with his usual Method-like tenacity. “I like to put it on the line,” he says, “whether it works または not, who cares?” And if he can’t do it his way, he really doesn’t care. Soon after Lars, Peter Jackson asked him to play the father in The Lovely Bones. His exit from the project, over “creative differences,” was typical. Among other things, he showed up on set 30 pounds heavier, to もっと見る credibly play a man ten years older than his then 26.
Which brings Gosling’s grand total of 映画 since 2006 to a whopping two—a number he’ll double this month, with All Good Things and Blue Valentine. “A friend of mine in the business told me Ryan was considered ungettable,” says Andrew Jarecki, the director of All Good Things. “He’s offered 50 big films a year, and he does one, maybe.” (Overstatement noted, but Gosling’s desirability is in remarkable contrast to his modest bankability.)
“To some extent, I think every actor would like to have been in The Notebook,” says Jarecki. “For Ryan, establishing an enormous audience means he now he gets to experiment.”
In All Good Things, he plays a character based on New York real-estate scion Robert Durst, who was linked to the disappearance of his wife (played によって Dunst) and a female friend; he was suspected (but never convicted) of their murder. Durst did go to jail for killing a neighbor in Texas. He was hiding out there—disguised as a woman. ゴスリング liked the role because “a lot of women think they’re with the guy from The Notebook” when, in fact, they are with a homicidal nut-job.
ゴスリング is sitting on a couch, in a big, puffy sweatshirt, looking defiantly ordinary and talking excitedly about YouTube videos, Disneyland rides, and monster movies. When he’s not working, which is a lot of the time, he, like Franco, can’t stand still. He sings and plays in the band Dead Man’s Bones; haunts magic shows run によって the original Magic 城 crew in Hollywood; takes shifts in a downtown L.A. deli, just for the hell of it; and waits tables at Tagine, a restaurant in Beverly Hills that he co-owns. At one time he was making “spooky leg lamps with sagging fishnets” out of prosthetic limbs. “He’s constantly pulling things out of his pocket—secrets that seem to be in contradiction to who he is,” says Michelle Williams, who co-stars with ゴスリング in Valentine. “Can あなた imagine someone as masculine and alpha as Ryan also likes to take ballet lessons?”
Blue Valentine, directed によって Derek Cianfrance, is the film that best captures Gosling’s particular brand of manliness—the back-and-forth between tender, boyish goofiness and a もっと見る virile, dangerous, and unpredictable sexuality. The film tracks the six-year devolution of a romance between Dean (Gosling), bighearted and blue-collar, and Cindy (Williams), the shy young nurse he marries and has a daughter with. The film is ultimately devastating—at times harsh and claustrophobic, like a pomo Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “Ryan plays his character with such brutal honesty,” says his friend Mark Ruffalo. “It’s when 芝居 becomes being.”
ゴスリング was intrigued によって the script’s evocation of “erosion and what a powerful force that is, that can turn a mountain into a rock. The film is like that Supremes song ‘Where Did Our 愛 Go’ ” he says. “It’s a mystery and あなた in the audience are the detective because the characters in the movie are too close to it—they’re not able to see what went wrong, what happened. They still 愛 each other, but they’re not in love: Why?”
He tried to persuade Cianfrance to shoot the two parts of the film—the couple’s courtship and the crumbling of the marriage—six years apart, to match the timeline of the script. “We couldn’t get anyone to finance that idea,” says Gosling. So the director enabled his star’s 愛 of improvisation and full character immersion as best he could. After completing the scenes of Dean and Cindy falling in 愛 (which includes an enchanting ukulele moment), and to prepare for the bad times, ゴスリング and Williams moved into a Pennsylvania house for four weeks with the young actress who played their daughter. They had a pretend クリスマス and birthdays, and ゴスリング “would make us アイスクリーム shakes to put on weight,” says Williams. “We’d clean up the kitchen, take out the trash, do a budget—I’d do a budget and Ryan would try to put in $500 a 年 for cigarettes.”
Big blowups were improvised, some lasting hours, and there was no way to fight fair with Gosling. “You’ve got to fight dirty, you’ve got to bite his ear,” says Williams, “because if I tried to match his energy and speed, I would never win.” She was initially hesitant about working with him. “With all that capacity, Ryan could be a steamroller. I know guys like that, and they take up all the air. I thought, I’m timid and I’m not going to be able to breathe. But within 分 I knew how wrong I had been. He’s incredibly sensitive and generous and will do anything to help you.”
The improvisation paid off in sex scenes with Williams that are difficult to watch—not because of any physical act, but because they are so emotionally raw. Blue Valentine was 与えられた an NC-17, a decision ゴスリング called “misogynistic” in a statement to the MPAA: It’s “okay supporting scenes that portray women in scenarios of sexual torture and violence for entertainment purposes, but they are trying to force us to look away from a scene that shows a woman in a sexual scenario, which is both complicit and complex.”
ゴスリング makes it hard not to sympathize with Dean. His desperation for Cindy might be off-putting in less charismatic hands, and her reasons for her discontent are purposefully vague. But Gosling, who was home-schooled によって his mother (and whom フレンズ call a proud mama’s boy), is on her side. “Michelle’s is the もっと見る interesting role,” he says. “There’s this idea that if a woman has a husband who loves her and isn’t cheating, she should be happy. But what if you’re not happy?”
次 spring, ゴスリング will headline two big studio films: the Warner Bros. comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love, with Steve Carell, and his first action film, Drive, in which he plays a stuntman who moonlights as a getaway driver. あなた could argue that it’s a sissy move, the very thing he professes to hate, but he’s doing it his way. The comedy is directed によって Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, the wicked minds behind Bad Santa; and Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn—known for highly violent art films—is directing Drive (a choice orchestrated によって Gosling). In addition, ゴスリング is in talks with George Clooney about starring in the film version of Farragut North, and Cianfrance, who just announced a 秒 drama with Gosling, is hoping to do a musical with him. “Ryan is the closest guy that could be Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor, all wrapped into one.”
ゴスリング might dislike the current business of Hollywood, but, actually, he’s a die-hard ファン of the classic studio system. “It used to be mandatory to sing, dance, and act—to do comedy as well as drama,” says Gosling. “You came out here and trained. Over time, [actors] got compartmentalized. If あなた tried to play a character that was south side of a character あなた were made famous for, あなた were kicked to the curb, または shamed into getting back in line. The idea,” he says, “is to go back to the way things used to be.”
