Its premise might seem a little dubious, but after it unspooled at the Toronto Film Festival this week, Lars and the Real Girl (opening Oct. 12) quickly started winning people over. The Notebook's Ryan Gosling — recently nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his work in Half Nelson — plays a shrinking wallflower of a guy, living in his brother's garage, who one day starts introducing people to his new girlfriend, Bianca. And it just so happens that Bianca is a life-sized plastic doll that he ordered off the Internet.

Even Gosling concedes that you might have your doubts about such a plotline. He did too, until he read the script, which quickly (and sweetly) up-ends expectations. The actor, in fact, compares it to Harvey, the wonderful 1950 comedy starring James Stewart as a man whose constant sidekick is an invisible, six-foot-three-and-a-half-inch rabbit. Maybe you can Netflix it as soon you're done reading this interview, which EW.com conducted with Gosling in Toronto earlier this week.

It might say something about his Canadian roots, but stardom seems to sit as lightly on the shoulders of Ryan Gosling – the London, Ont.-born, Academy Award-nominated actor who is in Toronto to attend the premiere of the boy-meets-inflatable-doll movie Lars and the Real Girl – as lightly as a snowflake.

And just watch him brush it off.

"All I try to do is make movies I'd like to see," he says with a thoughtful scratch of his beard. "And then I go and ruin the experience by being in them."

TORONTO (CP) — Ryan Gosling, Canada's hottest up-and-coming actor, doesn't act the part of a major movie star who's been in demand by big Hollywood studios ever since his Oscar-nominated performance in "Half Nelson" last year.

Gosling, dressed down in a denim shirt, brown pants and a pair of beat-up Doc Martens, was shy, sly and self-deprecating at a Toronto International Film Festival news conference on Monday to promote his new film, "Lars and the Real Girl."

Perhaps it's the Canadian in him. The 26-year-old Gosling was born in London, Ont., and raised in Cornwall.

"We don't have to fight about it," the soft-spoken Gosling joked to the news conference's American moderator when he was challenged about his comment that the surprisingly sweet film, about a troubled young man who falls in love with a sex doll, has a Canadian sensibility that felt familiar to him.

"Canadians are just nicer - it's known."