(Sunday April 21, 2002 From the San Francisco Chronicle)
It must have been something in the water.
What other reason for Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Keri Russell, and members of 'N Sync and now Ryan Gosling all have been Mouseketeers on "The Mickey Mouse Club"?
"I owe everything to Mickey Mouse," Gosling says, seriously. "I come from Cornwall, Ontario. What other way was there for me to get out? My whole family works at the paper mill there."
His name has little recognition factor yet. The only people who really know Gosling are the family members he left behind in a place where opportunities are few.
But with Barbet Schroeder's thriller "Murder By Numbers," which opens this weekend in theaters nationwide, all that could change. Gosling plays the cocky rich kid who teams up with a high school buddy to commit the perfect murder.
Now 21, with dark hair and sharp, slightly off-center features, Gosling says the Disney program was "a boot camp on this (movie) industry. They taught us a great work ethic."
He spent two years in Orlando, beginning at age 12. When he returned to Canada, he starred in the syndicated television series "Breaker High" and then moved on to New Zealand for the lead in the syndicated "Young Hercules."
But it was his role as a young Jewish skinhead in "The Believer" that put Gosling on the map. Debuting at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, he won the Grand Jury Prize for the role and an Independent Feature Project Spirit nomination for best actor. The London Film Critics and the Russian National Critics Association also cited his work.
Dressed in a powder-blue cowboy shirt, a camouflage cap perched incongruously on his head, Gosling smiles his crooked grin like the kind he uses to seduce women as the dangerous Richard Haywood in "Murder By Numbers."
"It scared me, this part," he says. "Richard had to have a certain quality to him that you couldn't put your finger on. He had to seduce everyone, to say what they wanted to hear."
As for any homosexual overtones of the relationship between the boys, Gosling, unlike co-star Michael Pitt, agrees that they're there.
"These two people are half of each other, and they're only whole when they're with each other. They're like two magnets in a room."
Gosling will be playing another disaffected character opposite Kevin Spacey in "The United States of Leland," scheduled for a fall release. "I play a confused youth who murders a Down syndrome kid," he says.
And he won't be going back to Ontario any time soon. He's made the move to Los Angeles, and he isn't looking back.
