In his review for Ryan Gosling’s new film The Fall Guy, Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson notes that the actor’s first post-Barbie role shows Gosling “still leading with his light side.” And thank goodness for that. “This is the better form of Gosling,” writes Lawson, “mesmerizing as some of his grim, laconic performances have been.” According to Gosling, it’s also an intentional move, as he recently told the Wall Street Journal.
At present, said Gosling, “I don’t really take roles that are going to put me in some kind of dark place.” Instead, he chooses roles by “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.” Eva, of course, is Eva Mendes, Gosling’s costar in the 2012 drama The Place Beyond the Pines. They share two daughters, 9-year-old Esmeralda and 8-year-old Amada, who call him “Papi,” he confirmed: “It kills me every time. There’s just nothing, nothing better than that.”
Before channeling his inner Kenergy for Barbie and belting Taylor Swift in The Fall Guy, it was 2016’s La La Land that marked this shift in his career, said Gosling. “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 said. “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.”
Since becoming a father, Gosling said he has became “way more conscious of everything” that he’s done or will do in his life. “I’m trying to just figure out who they are and be there for them in the way that I can,” he said. “They’re such clear and distinct personalities that it’s sort of becoming obvious,” adding, “You just want to be everything they deserve.” That ethos has also had an impact on Gosling’s future film choices. “I want to make stuff that’s inclusive, and that’s not for an audience of one,” he explained. “I think for so long I was just trying to pay the bills and work. It’s only recently that I feel like I realized that I have this opportunity to actually make the kind of films that made me love movies.”
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