Russell Crowe can’t stop laughing when he’s near Ryan Gosling.
The duo starred in 2016 film “The Nice Guys,” and according to Crowe, he couldn’t keep a straight face around Barbie’s Ken.
“I loved making that movie,” Crowe told GQ. “Ryan Gosling, Jesus Christ. Trying to work with that kid. […] There’s a thing in acting called corpsing — laughing inappropriately. That little motherfucker gets me every time.”
Crowe is notorious for being as serious as possible on set — especially after winning an Oscar for “Gladiator.” Yet while making the Shane Black film, Gosling just tapped into a different part of Crowe.
“I’m famous for not breaking character no matter what — Ridley [Scott] used to laugh about it. The Colosseum could be collapsing behind me [in ‘Gladiator’] and I’d still be doing my stuff,” Crowe said. “But then you’ve got something like ‘Nice Guys.’ People fucking love that movie.”
Black has said that Crowe joined the film only after Gosling was signed.
“My friend Anthony Bagarozzi and I concocted the script in 2001 that was set in the present day and it went nowhere. We tried it again as a TV show for CBS in 2006 and that went nowhere as well,” Black told IndieWire in 2016. “Finally, in 2014 we put it out one last time and Ryan Gosling looked at it and his agent said, ‘This is the sort of thing Ryan’s looking for.’ Within three days Russell Crowe said ‘I like it, and if Ryan’s doing it, I’ll do it.’ After thirteen years it just popped into place in three days.”
While rumors of a “Nice Guys” sequel have swirled for almost a decade, Gosling says a certain animated feature is to blame for a follow-up never getting made.
“So much of a sequel, I think, is decided by the opening weekend of a movie, and we opened up against ‘Angry Birds’,” Gosling told Comic Book. “So ‘Angry Birds’ just destroyed us. ‘Angry Birds’ got a sequel.”
“The Angry Birds Movie” had more than three times the opening weekend box office gross as “The Nice Guys,” $38 million to $11.2 million. “The Angry Birds Movie” got a 2019 sequel.
