Ryan Gosling for GQ

Presenting GQ’s Summer Issue Cover Star: Ryan Gosling https://t.co/1xLJ3GB3BW pic.twitter.com/v4Nm33Lk1J

— GQ Magazine (@GQMagazine) May 31, 2023

• In his youth, Ryan Gosling treated acting a little bit like therapy or an opportunity “to teach myself about myself.” He was in search of experiences—films that could capture a mood, or a feeling. “I was trying to find a place to put all these things that were happening to me. And these films became ways to do that, like time capsules.”

• His life changed when he and longtime partner Eva Mendes (together since 2011) had children: “Eva said she was pregnant…I would never want to go back, you know? I’m glad I didn’t have control over my destiny in that way, because it was so much better than I ever had dreamed for myself.”

• But don’t you dare misinterpret his relationship with his wife: “When you [earlier] asked me about Eva and kids, I think I said, I didn’t think about kids until she told me she was pregnant. That’s not really true. I didn’t want to overshare, but now I also don’t want to misrepresent. I mean, it’s true that I wasn’t thinking about kids before I met her, but after I met Eva, I realized that I just didn’t want to have kids without her. And there were moments on The Place Beyond the Pines where we were pretending to be a family, and I didn’t really want it to be pretend anymore. I realized that this would be a life I would be really lucky to have.”

I ask Gosling why he didn’t just say that the first time, given how nice, and how genuine, the sentiment is.

“I didn’t really want to get into it,” he says. “But I realized that I was misrepresenting the reality of it.””

• On his four year hiatus from acting, Gosling says he wanted to spend as much time as he could with his two daughters, and that’s that.

• He no longer treats acting like therapy, it’s just a job.

• On The Notebook: [Director, Nick Cassavetes] “straight up told me: ‘The fact that you have no natural leading man qualities is why I want you to be my leading man.’ ”

• His Starbucks cup has the name Freddie on it.

• Margot Robbie says Gosling is an overthinker. Gosling, she says, will say something, “and then 40 minutes later, he’ll come up to me and be like, ‘You know when I said that? I’m just clarifying that what I meant was, blah blah.’ And I’m like, ‘Why are you still thinking about that?’ ”

• Gosling on Ken: “Ken, his job is beach. For 60 years, his job has been beach. What the fuck does that even mean?”

• Greta Gerwig says she cast Gosling as Ken because “there is a quality to Ryan’s acting, even when he is hilarious, it’s never the actor standing outside of the role commenting on or judging this person. He doesn’t try and make you know that Ryan Gosling knows that this is silly. He does it in a way that takes on all of the potential humiliations of the character as his own.”

• Part of the reason Gosling took on BARBIE was the chance to work with a bunch of women on a project that puts the female characters forward.

• It was his Elvis impersonator uncle who first gave him a glimpse of how art can transform both the people who make it and the people who observe it.

• On his experience with the Mickey Mouse Club: “Everybody was at, like, prodigy level. I certainly wasn’t a child prodigy. I didn’t know why I was there. And I think that was the consensus. It’s why I didn’t work—it was like, they dressed me up as a hamster or put me in the background of someone’s song. But it was all a great experience in a way because it helped me figure out what I wasn’t going to be good at. Which is important to learn too.”

• He feels a connection to Ken: “There’s something about this Ken that really, I think, relates to that version of myself. Just, like, the guy that was putting on Hammer pants and dancing at the mall and smelling like Drakkar Noir and Aqua Net-ing bangs. I owe that kid a lot. I feel like I was very quick to distance myself from him when I started making more serious films. But the reality is that, like, he’s the reason I have everything I have.”

• He thought a lot about his younger self filming BARBIE: “He didn’t know what he was doing or why he was doing it, he was just doing it, and it’s like, I owe my whole life to him. And I wish I had been more grateful at the time, you know? I really had to go back and touch base with that little dude,” Gosling says, “and say thank you, and ask for his help.”

• Currently, Gosling lives in a quiet town in the southern half of California. Because he brings his family to the location of each movie he shoots, he aims to do only one or so per year. He and Mendes don’t have nannies and do the parenting themselves with help from relatives.

• Gosling is frankly romantic about his life with his two daughters and Mendes. He says things were one way, then they were another. “I was looking for her, you know? …it all makes sense now.”

• Emily Blunt says he watches everyone and everyone’s nuances and he is genuinely interested in people. “I’m sure it’s a deflection strategy,” she says, laughing. “I’m sure I told him many more intimate secrets than he told me. He’s quite gifted at that.”

• On sending a Scottish man with bagpipes to quote Braveheart at Gerwig’s BARBIE sleepover: “Well, sometimes, you just need to hear it.”

• He had a rough day at his daughter’s birthday party the day before, as a bunch of family flew in for the event: “I think I made over 30 pizzas and over 40 espresso drinks. And since my stepdad is Roman, I think all of those things might put me aligned to apply for my Italian citizenship.”

• He snuck into a test screening of BARBIE to catch the reactions.

• On the social media criticism of him as Ken: “I would say, you know, if people don’t want to play with my Ken, there are many other Kens to play with…It is funny,” he says, “this kind of clutching-your-pearls idea of, like, #notmyken. Like you ever thought about Ken before this? But suddenly, it’s like, ‘No, we’ve cared about Ken this whole time.’ No, you didn’t. You never did. You never cared. Barbie never fucked with Ken. That’s the point. If you ever really cared about Ken, you would know that nobody cared about Ken. So your hypocrisy is exposed. This is why his story must be told. [Laughs] I care about this dude now. I’m like his representative. ‘Ken couldn’t show up to receive this award, so I’m here to accept it for him.’”

Source, pictures: one/two