Gone are the days of Ryan Gosling beating goons to a pulp in elevators in films like “Drive” or drinking a marriage into dissolution in “Blue Valentine”. At least for right now. In a recent Wall Street Journal Magazine interview, Gosling admitted that the softer, more fun roles he’s taken on lately are largely a result of looking out for his wife, Eva Mendes, and their children. The actor says that his decision to step back from more intense roles with came after preparing for his role in the Oscar-winning musical “La La Land”.
“I think ‘La La Land’ was the first,” Gosling said when asked about his practice of factoring his children into the roles he chooses. “It was just sort of like, ‘Oh, this will be fun for them, too, because even though they’re not coming to set, we’re practicing piano every day or we’re dancing or we’re singing.’”
He claims his latest Oscar-nominated performance in “Barbie” took great inspiration from his daughters and the way they treated their Ken dolls, saying “Their interest in Barbie and their disinterest in Ken was an inspiration. I thought, they were already making little movies about their Barbies on the iPad when it happened, so the fact that I was going off to work to make one too, we just felt like we were aligned.”
While fans may hope he changes his tune over time and finds his way back to the darker roles that shaped him as an actor, Gosling says, for now, he’s happy with the light, silly material he’s digging into now.
“I don’t really take roles that are going to put me in some kind of dark place,” said Gosling. “This moment is what I feel like trying to read the room at home and feel like what is going to be best for all of us. The decisions I make, I make them with Eva and we make them with our family in mind first.”
Gosling can now be seen in theaters in Universal’s “The Fall Guy”, adapted from the popular ‘80s television series by Drew Pearce, directed by David Leitch (“John Wick”, “Bullet Train”), and co-starring Emily Blunt, Hannah Waddingham, Winston Duke, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
