In The Works:
Sundance Kid
By Degen Pener
Photograph by Craig de Cristo
WHO IS RYAN GOSLING?
HE’S THE SUBVERSIVE rookie who shook up Sundance with his bravura work in The Believer, the hyperpraised 2001 Grand Jury Prize winner that so disturbed the big screen suits that it was busted down to Showtime. “Everybody was scared to distribute it,” he says of his graphic debut. “They thought you’d go in and walk out a skinhead. I don’t think people are that stupid.”
HE MAY BE the least likely actor since Charlton Heston to put on a yarmulke. Gosling, 20, was raised a Mormon in Ontario, Canada; in The Believer, he plays a bad-ass neo-Nazi who happens to be Jewish. But that’s why they call it acting. “His characterization was perfectly balanced,” says writer-director Henry Bean (who also penned the latter-day-noir classics Deep Cover and Internal Affairs). “The more Nazi he was,” Bean says of Gosling’s Method-style madness, “the more Jewish he became.”
HE’S THE SON of a traveling bra salesman. He father “had the perfect C-cup hand --- and I inherited it,” he says. “I grew up with women. I don’t think anyone can teach you how to be a man but a woman. You only learn by learning what they need.” Apparently he learned pretty well. “Every single woman on the set had a crush on him,” says Sandra Bullock, who gets her bra snapped by Gosling in his next project, Fool Proof, the upcoming Barbet (Single White Female) Schroeder thriller. Of his character, a lovesick teenage murder suspect, Gosling says, “He thinks killing somebody is the most intimate thing.”
HE’S COME AS CLOSE as any self-respecting actor can to a career as a Backstreet Boy. At 12, Gosling was a member of Disney’s (new) Mickey Mouse Club, doing the happy-rodent dance with such future teen godheads as Keri Russell, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, and Britney Spears (who coolly rebuffed him). A non-Mickey neighbor was Backstreet’s AJ McLean. “He was telling me about this band,” recalls Gosling. “’We’re going to be huge, man.’ I was like, ‘Blah, blah, blah. Whatever.’ I thought he was lying. He said, ‘We need a blonde kid. I’ll introduce you to our manager.’ And I was like, “Just throw the ball.”
HE’S A FIVE-YEAR ALUM of children’s TV, starring in such highfalutin grade-school fare as Goosebumps, The Road to Avonlea, and Young Hercules (as the muscle-bound title character). A determined stand saved him from Freddie Prinze, Jr. territory, as he repeatedly resisted roles in teen flicks and WB-friendly pilots: “I made a personal pact not to be a part of that whole thing,” he says, recalling the days of sleeping on friends’ couches and subsisting on peanut butter. “Integrity is his core,” says David Morse, who stars with Gosling in the young actor’s second thriller, The Slaughter Rule. Now, like a good Mormon --- Gosling doesn’t drink or smoke --- he has to confront the buzz of unexpected fame. “Nobody even knows who I am,” Gosling says, “and I’ve already lost my anonymity.”
