A day or two before we met , I gloated about my approved interview with Ryan Gosling, the sexy star of the new action-thriller Drive,�to all my friends on Facebook.
Several of my female friends wrote back, hot and bothered, telling me how unbelievable my job was. I thought I was so cool.
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I was assigned to cover the press junket journalists hoping that their four-minute block of interview time gets extended to five.) Or in this case, I hoped my interview time would extend indefinitely.
These junkets are arranged so press – domestic and international -- can ask questions fans would want to know about the movie.
Or the actor’s personal life. Or anything.�But when you're sitting across from someone like Ryan Gosling and he talks to you, your mind tends to go blank. Let me back up. Normally, the actor doesn’t talk directly to the journalists. Typically, he or she enters the room, sits at the table and fields five to 10 pointed questions about the film. Then, a studio representative says, “Thank you,” and the actor is carted away immediately. Gone as quickly as they come.
But Ryan talked to me. He actually spoke to me.
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NEXT PAGE: Ah! It's Gosling!
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For the love of Gosling
I hadn't noticed when he entered. How is that possible, you ask? Well, sometimes you’re waiting 10 minutes, 30 or even several hours, before the actors show up.
So, about this time, the other journalists were buzzing about the movie while I was doodling on my junket notes. That’s a packet of information-- cast bios, production notes, film history –�the studio publicists spend hours compiling into a 40-plus page handbook, of which I was too nervous to read.
Any volunteers? Ryan Gosling wants to be "making babies">>
Instead, I was drawing on the cover page like a high school freshman waiting for the hottest guy in school to talk to me. It never ends, ladies, not even when you're old and you pretend you don't care if anyone talks to you anymore.
I was tracing the letters D-R-I-V-E over the logo on my junket packet when someone said, "I like your addition to the Drive font." I looked up. It was him. Ryan Gosling. He had entered the 1:25 p.m. roundtable session at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, where I sat with five other journalists around a table waiting for him to arrive. It was almost 2:30. He was less than one hour late. Impressive. And, it was most likely because he's a nice guy.
So, why so nervous? I interviewed celebrities before, George Clooney, Matt Damon�and�Sandra Bullock, to name a few. Usually, celebrities are easy to talk to, and there’s no awkwardness. So why was speaking to Ryan Gosling making me sweat like I’d just run a marathon? His bad-boy image, perhaps? He’s known for his controversial roles.
A drug-addicted inner city teacher in Half Nelson , a neo-Nazi in The Believer , and now Drive, the story of a mysterious stunt driver who runs a getaway car service at night. Those were kind of edgy roles, and then, he is in The Notebook, the 2004 romantically sweeping love story starring Rachel McAdams. Maybe that was what was making me so nervous.�
THoughtful, bold and beautiful?
I have always wanted to see a violent John Hughes movie.”
“How much of your own stunt driving do you do in the movie?” one reporter asked. Clearly, I was in no state to ask the first question. Gosling answered modestly. “The really cool stuff I didn’t do. The really cool stuff is J. Fry.” He wasn’t afraid to give credit where it was due. “He’s about as good as it gets,” he said of the stunt driver. Was that it, though? Driving fast. That's what attracted him to the film and every woman in America to him?
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The validity of his bad-boy status was clearly a question that was not only mine. “Is driving fast what attracted you to this film?” another reporter asked.� Thank God she got the question out. “I have always wanted to see a violent John Hughes movie,” he said. “I always thought… if Pretty in Pink had a head smashing in it, it would be perfect.”
OK, that’s a tough pill to swallow. Whose head would be smashed? Not Blane’s, I hope. Maybe Steff. OK, I can see that. I guess Gosling was mixing genres, and that's just part of his genius. Head smashing and all. But isn’t that what an artist does -- shock people? Am I making excuses for him, or is he actually thoughtful, bold and beautiful? Looking across the table, I still hadn’t gotten the answer to my question: What is it about Ryan Gosling that makes him so attractive?
NEXT PAGE: Wait, why did Gosling get expelled from school?
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Violence is his thing
 | “I've always had a fantasy about robbing banks, but I’m scared of jail.” |
Someone asked him about his childhood. Good, maybe we’d find the answer, or at least get a sense of where he gets his sense of defiance.
“When I was a kid and I first saw First Blood,” he said, “It put a spell on me, and I thought I was Rambo. I went to school the next day with my Fisher-Price Houdini Kit filled with steak knives and I threw it at all the kids at recess,” he explained, not proud, but not ashamed either. “And I got suspended. As I should have been. I learned my lesson and I’m sorry.” God, he’s humble. Or just gorgeous. Couldn’t decide, but loved that story. What was happening to me?
“My parents put a leash on me and said, ‘This kid can’t watch movies because… they put a spell on him.’ So, I could only watch Bible movies and National Geographic movies, and Abbott and Costello movies. Meanwhile, all those movies are kind of violent, so it didn’t really work, but I see what they were going for.“
Was it me or was that the cutest thing you’ve ever heard? He threw knives on the playground. Wait, what am I saying? Maybe he just wanted to be a hero like Rambo and didn’t know how to get the point across. He’d done quite a few heroic things in his adult life. He wasn’t all bad-boy.�
In August, a video of him breaking up a street fight in New York went viral and ladies swooned everywhere with thoughts of Gosling defending their honor. When asked if he thought of himself as a hero in relation to the fight, he said, “No, that was stupid.”
The strong, silent type
So, he’s a violent-thinking, physically non-violent guy who is modest and charming? Sounds perfect. Wonder what his co-star Carey Mulligan thought of all this. I finally had the nerve to ask him a question. What did he think about working with his sexy co-star on the set of Drive? “She was my partner in crime,” he said. “She secretly didn’t want to talk, either.”
What he is referring to here is that the film is very sparse on dialogue, a classic Western style. How did Gosling work like that? He explained, “We would come to set in the morning and Nick [the director] would be like, ‘What do you want to say?’ and Carey would say, ‘Well, I don’t want to say this.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, I don’t want to say that,’ and she’d say, ‘I don’t want to say this,’ and I’d say, ‘I don’t want to say that,’ until we weren’t saying anything. And Nick said, ‘OK, great. Let’s shoot it.”
The strong silent type, too? Is he reading a book on qualities that turn women to jelly? Perhaps, or maybe the bad-boy persona is just a phase? When asked, Gosling didn’t seem to think so.
He didn’t even see the trend until one of the reporters pointed it out. Drive was just one of his recent forays into stunt movies. The Place Beyond the Pines, a film about a motorcycle stunt driver who becomes a thief, is Gosling’s next film. So, when asked if there was a daredevil theme developing, he laughed. “Well, I guess I see what you mean,” he said.
His fantasy = Robbing banks
“I’ve always had a fantasy about robbing banks, but I’m scared of jail,” he continued. �Everyone laughed. This was a joke, right? �No, no joke. “I’ve had this fantasy that I would get on a motorcycle, and I would drive to the back of a U-Haul parked around the corner and they’d be looking for this guy on a motorcycle, not a guy in a U-Haul. And, I told this to the director, and he said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. I just wrote a script about that.’ So, I had to do that.� Now there’s a theme I guess, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time,” he said.
A hot guy robbing banks to pay for his kids? Yep, American women are pretty much going to love that, too.
By then, it was time for the interview to end. The studio rep stood up and said, “Thank you.” But Gosling wanted to make sure we got all our questions answered.
Ryan gives us the middle finger... sort of
That’s when one of the reporters asked him to sign a promotional "driver's glove" the studio had given us for the film. He said, “Yes,” of course and took the time to wait for the nervous reporter to remove the packaging. Then, he put the glove – oh, to touch that glove! -- on his hand and signed his name, very thoughtfully, on the middle finger.
He laughed as if he never does anything ironic. Everyone else laughed nervously, too. But by then, I stopped trying to figure out what it was about Ryan Gosling that made everyone so nervous, men and women, alike. I accepted that he just has that affect on people. He’s not snobby or preoccupied .
Ryan Gosling is an old-fashioned hero. He’s an instigator. He’s an intellectual. He’s a lover, and he’s an artist. He is responsible for his actions. He makes no excuses for himself. He breaks up a fight, but he apologizes for it. He throws knives at people at school, but he knows it’s wrong.
Ryan Gosling isn’t just an Adonis when it comes to his looks; he’s surprisingly human. Maybe that makes him the perfect man? Good looking, mysterious, sexy and just plain nice. What do you think, ladies? Is it possible to roll everything into one 6'1" adorable hunk? In Ryan Gosling, I’m gonna guess it is.
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