While so many screen romantic comedies feel plastic, Lars and The Real Girl makes a virtue of it. The star and director of the offbeat film talk to Helen Barlow
Ryan Gosling is known for playing loners and outsiders, and mostly for making them likable. After realising his potential as a romantic lead in The Notebook, he was keen to try screen romance again. Yet it was never going to be an ordinary romance because in Lars and The Real Girl the girl of the title is a doll. Not an ordinary doll, but an anatomically correct life-size sex doll named Bianca.

Lars is delusional and he believes that Bianca is the love of his life. Naturally it was important that Gosling respect the silicon doll in order to play someone who loves her.
In fact the film's Australian New-York based director, Craig Gillespie, went to great lengths to ensure that was the case.
"Bianca had her own trailer, and when she came on set, she was treated like any other actor," explains Gosling. "Somehow she had a really calming and peaceful quality and when they called action and we were alone there was a real connection. For me this is the most romantic film I've made, even more romantic than The Notebook."
Lars, whose mother died giving birth to him, lives in the back yard of his brother's house under the watchful eye of his pregnant sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer). Now that a new baby is coming he needs someone to love of his own. He buys Bianca on-line.
Gosling absorbed himself into the character and even lived in the garage on the film's wintry Canadian set to develop a sense of Lars' isolation - until crew members became too disruptive early in the morning when laying fake snow.
"I just felt like I needed to get out of my own body," says the 27-year-old Canadian, who grew a moustache and put on weight for the part.
"Mostly for roles I have to work out. My body is not normally the body of a guy who has just sat in his garage his whole life."
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