There are fortunes to be made playing thrill-seeking action heroes and cool-handed rakes that ooze the kind of innate primal magnetism that transcends language—and, sometimes, even forgoes it all together—and has allowed the American film industry to become a truly global one. So when an actor like Ryan Gosling chooses to build a career by repeatedly rebuffing the advances of that renowned dark mistress, Hollywood, it’s at least worth wondering whether or not she’s still got it. But from the beginning, Gosling’s choices have been almost refreshingly uneasy: From his first major film role, as a confused, self-loathing anti-Semite in the 2001 drama
The Believer; to playing the romantic lead in Nick Cassavetes’s
The Notebook (2004), the kind of movie that girls in their pajamas (and certain guys) will continue to watch over and over as long as love remains an attractive emotion for humans to experience and the earth continues to spin on its axis; to his Oscar-nominated performance as a crack-addicted middle school teacher in
Half Nelson (2006); to his turn as a young man in crisis who falls in love with a sex doll in
Lars and the Real Girl (2007), a film which, despite the glibness with which the premise is often articulated, is actually shot through with a remarkable and complicated degree of emotional depth. In fact, “remarkable” and “complicated” are good ways to describe Gosling’s body of work thus far. He’s already got a minimum of four seminal performances, one Oscar nomination, and one late-night girly classic under his belt.
Now, after years of avoiding Hollywood like the soul-sucking vulture that she is, Gosling might very well be in a position to save her—or, at least, make her feel alive again. He’s got three new films in the can, two of which are due out next month. The first, Andrew Jarecki’s
All Good Things, is a drama inspired by the real-life case of New York City real estate heir Robert Durst, about a man whose wife mysteriously disappears—and whose dark past comes to light when he is connected to a murder nearly two decades later. The second, Derek Cianfrance’s
Blue Valentine, co-stars Michelle Williams, and presents a darker, unvarnished vision of impossible love, sketching both the coming together, and the coming apart, of a relationship. As a piece of filmmaking, it’s small, intimate, and without a stitch of gloss—and Gosling and Williams deliver two of the most sensitive, powerful performances you’re likely to see this year. He also recently began work on the action-thriller
Drive, about a stunt man who moonlights as a getaway-car driver. But before that film is released, Gosling will do something he has never done before: star in a comedy,
Crazy, Stupid, Love, alongside Julianne Moore, Emma Stone, and his interviewer here, Steve Carell.
