Ask most actors who inspired them to embark on an acting career and the chances are they will hesitate for a moment before saying someone like Marlon Brando or their high school drama teacher. Not Ryan Gosling. The 35-year-old star of such diverse films as The Notebook, Lars and the Real Girl, Drive and The Nice Guys, has no doubt who his inspiration was. “It was my uncle Elvis Perry, the Elvis impersonator,” he says. “He showed me there was a whole other world out there.”
In love with acting
Gosling was seven years old at the time and living with his family in the small Canadian town of Cornwall, when his flamboyant uncle burst into his life and changed it forever. “We were living normal kind of boring lives and then my uncle came to live with us and one day he showed up in a dazzling white jumpsuit and said he was going to be an Elvis impersonator and he wanted us all to be in his act,” Gosling recalls with a laugh. “Life got really fun for a little while. He started talking, walking and singing like Elvis and it was the most interesting thing that had ever happened to our family and in our town. It was so exciting that everyone wanted to be involved. So my father became head of his security, my mother became a back-up singer, I became a back-up dancer and suddenly we were all in his act.”
“It was an eye-opening experience because I didn’t know that entertainment was really a job, and that show business was something you could really do. So I started in my own way trying to keep that energy alive and put myself into dance classes and I took as many classes as I could to try and get back into that world,” he adds.
Gosling succeeded far beyond his expectations and has become an established A-lister through an intriguing mix of quirky, low budget features and more high-profile projects such as The Ides of March, Gangster Squad, The Big Short and the latest action-comedy The Nice Guys, with Russell Crowe. “I didn’t know Russell well and I’d always hoped we’d work together and I thought it would probably be in a drama of sorts, but this was a nice surprise because it was new to both of us,” says Gosling.
Unassuming and unpretentious, Gosling has a dry sense of humour and keeps a low-key profile when he does not have to be in the public eye. He admits he dislikes giving interviews because, he says, “The interesting thing about interviews is that you get asked a lot of questions that a therapist would ask and the benefit of therapy is that no-one can repeat all the stupid things you say. Unfortunately in interviews, just the dumb things you say end up getting printed.”
On the home front
But nowadays he seems much more relaxed and at ease. At the time he was living in an insalubrious part of the city’s downtown district, but since then has moved to New York where he set up home with actor Eva Mendes, whom he met on the set of The Place Beneath the Pines in 2011. They now live in Los Angeles with their two daughters, Esmeralda, nearly two, and Amanda, born on April 29.
“It’s just heaven,” he says. “I feel so lucky and I can’t believe having daughters has changed my life and it’s become better than I ever could have imagined. Just being at home and spending a day with my daughters is just so exciting.”
Life for him now is so different from his early days in Canada, when he struggled with a troubled and unhappy childhood. “I had a difficult time,” he recalls. “I was always in trouble. I wasn’t doing well at school and I didn’t have any self-confidence.” He was frequently beaten up and had trouble learning to read and write. Eventually, he was placed in a special education class with mentally handicapped children, until his mother Donna removed him from school and taught him at home, giving him confidence and encouraging him to express himself.
Then came his Elvis-impersonating uncle and a goal in life. After taking dance classes he began his show business career performing with his sister at local talent shows and then, in 1993, he was chosen over 17,000 other young hopefuls to join the Disney Channel’s revival of the Mickey Mouse Club.
He went on to appear in other family entertainment shows in his native Canada, and when he was 17, he moved to Hollywood. His first starring role in a feature film was as a Jewish neo-Nazi in The Believer and he then built a reputation for performing in independent films such as Murder by Numbers, The Slaughter Rule and The United States of Leland.
He gained worldwide attention in 2004 in the sentimental drama The Notebook, which won him a huge female fan following and several Teen Choice awards. “It’s funny because up until The Notebook I couldn’t even get an audition for a leading man part, so I sort of accepted the fact that if I was going to have a career as an actor it would be as a character actor and my brain was wired that way,” he says.
“Then director Nick Cassavetes hired me to do The Notebook because I was an unlikely choice for it. He liked the fact that I’d played psychopaths before. Since I was in that film the perception of me changed and I began to play less tortured characters in more adult roles.”
His performance as a drug-addicted schoolteacher in Half Nelson won him a Best Actor Oscar nomination and he earned Golden Globe nominations for Lars and the Real Girl and Blue Valentine.
He has two projects he is planning to direct, but in the meantime, he has the musical comedy La La Land, in which he plays a jazz pianist, awaiting release, and he is preparing to begin filming the long-awaited Blade Runner sequel for Ridley Scott. “I can’t say too much about it because they’ve put a chip in my neck and my head will explode if I do,” he says. “But I can tell you it’s a sequel, not a remake, and Harrison Ford is in it.”
Despite the accolades he receives and the scripts which keep coming his way, Gosling still seems slightly bemused about his success, unsure of how it happened and which direction to take next. “I’m still trying to figure that out,” he says.