If you saw Ryan Gosling’s turn last year as a skinny, crack-addicted teacher in “Half Nelson,” you might not recognize him onscreen Friday in “Lars and the Real Girl.”

Gosling bulked up and grew a mustache for his role as Lars, a painfully shy man who lives in a garage and finds true love with a life-sized sex doll he buys online.

“I just felt like I needed to get out of my own body,” said Gosling, who scored a Best Actor Oscar nomination for “Half Nelson.” “I am a guy that in my life, mostly for roles, has had to work out. My body is not the body of a guy who has just sat in his garage his whole life.”

Academy Award-nominee Ryan Gosling (Half Nelson) is following up his starring roles in Fracture and Lars and the Real Girl with the role of Jack Salmon, father of 14-year-old murder victim Susie, in the big screen adaptation of Alice Sebold’s best-selling novel, The Lovely Bones. Rachel Weisz has been cast as Gosling’s onscreen wife, with Saoirse Ronan of Atonement and the upcoming City of Ember playing Susie Salmon.

Peter Jackson will be directing the much-anticipated film from a screenplay he adapted with Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh. The story is told from Susie’s point of view, looking down from Heaven. After her rape and murder, Susie watches as her family and school friends work through their grief and come to terms with her disappearance.

On the set of Fox Walden’s City of Ember in Belfast, Ireland, Gosling’s Lovely Bones daughter Saoirse Ronan spoke enthusiastically about signing on to play Susie.
“I love being able to do a variety of different things so it’s great to do a film like this and then do The Lovely Bones which is a bit more deep, I suppose,” Ronan told About.com in September 2007. “But you know, I’ve read the script, obviously, a few times, The Lovely Bones, and it’s quite humorous, you know? I mean when you hear it, obviously you think that it’s going to be really dark when you hear what it’s about. But it’s actually got funny bits in it. It’s such a beautiful script and they did a great job, so I’m very, very excited.”

"I mean, God bless The Notebook,” Gosling says. “It introduced me to one of the great loves of my life. But people do Rachel and me a disservice by assuming we were anything like the people in that movie. Rachel and my love story is a hell of a lot more romantic than that.”
They broke up, is the thing. It’s been a few months. Gosling says it wasn’t the attention that did it, but other than that he doesn’t really know what to say. “The only thing I remember is we both went down swingin’ and we called it a draw,” he says.

The Notebook people have taken it harder. “Women are mad at me,” Gosling says with a rueful smile. “A girl came up to me on the street and she almost smacked me. Like, ‘How could you? How could you let a girl like that go?’ I feel like I want to give people hugs, they seem so sad. Rachel and I should be the ones getting hugs! Instead, we’re consoling everybody else.”

You can read the whole interview at Men.Style.com.

26-year-old actor Ryan Gosling's career continues to be on an upswing even as he continues to take unconventional roles in smaller independent movies after his recent Oscar nomination. His memorable performance in the title role of the sublime dramedy Lars and the Real Girl is no exception, as Gosling gained weight and grew a moustache to look older as a lonely man who always keeps to himself until he purchases a lifelike sex doll and starts introducing her to his worried family and friends as his "new girlfriend Bianca." Much to everyone's surprise, she allows Lars to come out of his shell as the entire town embraces Bianca and tries to get her involved in the community. With a great ensemble cast including Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson, it's a far more intelligent and moving film than some might expect from such a high concept premise, but it never loses sight of the fact that it's a comedy, and it's just as likely to have you laughing as it is to draw a tear or two.

After the film debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival to rave reviews, Gosling has been doing the interview rounds and ComingSoon.net caught up with him in New York City.

ComingSoon.net: Did you look at this movie as an opportunity to give another acting tour de force?
Ryan Gosling: (laughs) No, I thought it was terrifying. I thought a guaranteed failure, for sure on my part you know? It's such a tricky role, but I loved the script. To be honest, when I first read it, I thought this was a movie about a guy and a sex doll and it's never going to hold up for the whole film, and I was crying at the end of the script and I thought, "Who is this woman? This writer, Nancy Oliver that got me to this place?" I couldn't have imagined it. It reminded me of "Harvey" it's one of my favorite films, it reminded me of "Being There," "Harold and Maude," a little of "The Velveteen Rabbit." It just reminded me of all these things that for some reason, they're like movies that are genres into themselves. There just aren't many of them, and I don't know why. We all love them, but yet they just appear every now and again.