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Ryan Gosling is definitely on the spotlight! A few days ago, people were talking about Jake Gyllenhaal, another tMF favorite and one of today's most popular young actors. but now Gosling steals his thunder with an upcoming GQ spread!

As the news surrounding his recent departure from the Peter Jackson film, The Lovely Bones, picks up more heat, Gosling's interview with GQ's Alex Pappademas features the actor in 12 pages of pure Ryan pleasure!

The interview is one of the most comprehensive ever with the very private Ryan. Here are a few highlights and some favorite parts:

When he moved to Los Angeles—on his own at 16, crashing on couches—and started going on auditions for movies, he realized his résumé was problematic, consisting as it did of “The Mickey Mouse Club and me with a spear, fighting, like, a big phoenix. I couldn’t get into a lot of rooms.”

It took one movie to change that—The Believer, a fact-based drama about a teenage skinhead who’s also a Jew. Gosling insists that it was the part, not him; that any knucklehead—a self-descriptor he’s fond of—could have done what he did; that he threw himself into the role so completely out of gratitude to writer-director Henry Bean, who cast him even though he wasn’t Jewish (or a Nazi).

The Believer is one of Gosling's earliest films and certainly one of his finest. This is the film that made Hollywood sit up and take notice.

On selling out and making compromises:

“People always say, ‘Go make the Fractures so you can make your Half Nelsons’,” Gosling says. “And the truth is, I got way more opportunities out of Half Nelson than I did out of Fracture. I’ve always been surprised at how many opportunities I’ve gotten out of the things I really believed in, versus the things I thought I should be doing.

“I’ve had actors that I really respect tell me, ‘You’ve gotta surf-and-turf it in this town. One for them and one for you.’ That’s not true. It’s really three for them and one for you. And not only that—if you do three for them, you’ve set a precedent. Any way you point yourself is where you’re gonna go. If you point yourself in that direction, it’s hard to ever come back.”

“Being an actor,” he says, “is like being a cat burglar. You try to get in and out without being noticed. As soon as you get famous, it’s like you’ve got a marching band with you every time you walk out of the house. And it’s harder to make people believe you as a character. And your work goes downhill.”

On his split with Rachel McAdams:

“I mean, God bless The Notebook,” Gosling says. “It introduced me to one of the great loves of my life. But people do Rachel and me a disservice by assuming we were anything like the people in that movie. Rachel and my love story is a hell of a lot more romantic than that.”

They broke up, is the thing. It’s been a few months. Gosling says it wasn’t the attention that did it, but other than that he doesn’t really know what to say. “The only thing I remember is we both went down swingin’ and we called it a draw,” he says.

The Notebook people have taken it harder. “Women are mad at me,” Gosling says with a rueful smile. “A girl came up to me on the street and she almost smacked me. Like, ‘How could you? How could you let a girl like that go?’ I feel like I want to give people hugs, they seem so sad. Rachel and I should be the ones getting hugs! Instead, we’re consoling everybody else.”

On Lars and the Real Girl:

“I cried at the end, when I read it,” Gosling says. “I just thought it was so romantic—the idea that you don’t need to be loved in return in order to love something or someone. Love can come from you. It doesn’t have to be reciprocal. People love their cars. People love all kinds of things, and they really love them. And we don’t really value that kind of love because it’s not a real, reciprocal kind of love, but it’s real love to them.”

“You probably hear this a lot, but he was my first choice,” Lars director Craig Gillespie says of Gosling. “He’s got this innocence about him and this incredibly receptive face—everything in his eyes is positive and optimistic. I felt that’s what Lars was.”

The Last Word:

“I liked being young. I just didn’t like the idea that I couldn’t be in control of my day. The fact that there were all these people that were in charge of my day was something I couldn’t get my head around. It got me into a lot of trouble.

“I just wanted to have more control over my life,” Gosling says. “And I thought the entertainment business, being an actor, seemed like the answer. It seemed like you make lots of money and nobody tells you what to do. I didn’t realize that, with the kind of movies I was going to make, I wasn’t going to make a lot of money and everyone was going to tell me what to do.”

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The GQ article, The Loner is written by Alex Pappademas; Photographs by Nathaniel Goldberg. [ Click for the full article here ]

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You are such a great actor Ryan. Rock on!

Rocky , October 25, 2007

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