Ryan Gosling joined the Mickey Mouse Club at twelve alongside Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Justin Timberlake. He was the quiet one in the ensemble. He moved in with the Timberlakes for a while because his own family was touring between Canadian cities. He auditioned for everything. He got most of it.
Biography
Ryan Gosling joined the Mickey Mouse Club at twelve alongside Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Justin Timberlake. He was the quiet one in the ensemble. He moved in with the Timberlakes for a while because his own family was touring between Canadian cities. He auditioned for everything. He got most of it.
The Notebook in 2004 made him a leading man overnight. Gosling then did the precise opposite of capitalizing. He starred in Half Nelson as a crack-addicted middle school teacher. He starred in Lars and the Real Girl as a man dating a sex doll. He starred in Blue Valentine, a chamber piece about the collapse of a marriage. All three drew Oscar attention. None of them resembled The Notebook.
In 2011 Drive redefined what a movie star could whisper. In 2016 La La Land made him a musical lead and won him a Golden Globe. In 2023 he played Ken in Barbie — a role most actors would have downshifted for — and instead turned in the most committed comic performance of the decade, complete with an Oscar-nominated musical number in a rhinestone vest.
Offscreen he writes and records music as Dead Man's Bones, publishes in The New York Times, and once wrote and directed Lost River, a surreal film about the Detroit ruins that divided critics cleanly down the middle. He speaks rarely in public and rides a motorcycle to premieres.
Gosling's trajectory is a private-case demonstration of something very hard to do: to be a star without being a brand. He is still doing it. The tuxedos are getting pinker. The range is getting wider. The next role is always somehow unexpected.
