After having played a Jewish skinhead and two teenage murderers, Ryan Gosling doesn't see himself as a star. As a child he had no desire to act, but at 13, he left his small Canadian hometown to audition for "The Mickey Mouse Club," in which he eventually starred alongside such future household names as Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears.
Even then he felt like the odd man out. He was dismissed from the song-and-dance numbers because, as he says with a laugh, "As soon as I got there, they realized that I had no talent, so they didn't ever use me really. I think they were trying to fill a Canadian quotient."
After another television gig, "Breaker High," the then-16-year-old moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career, driven more by economic need than an internal calling.
As an extra on "Remember the Titans," Gosling managed to persuade filmmakers to throw him the occasional line, and he took advantage of his free time on set to observe the filmmaking process. It was at that point that he felt this could be his future.
"When I finished that film I felt like I really needed to put my energies into something that I could care about and stop floundering," he says. "So I just waited. And I got very lucky, because 'The Believer' was around and I'd never read anything like it and I haven't since."
Gosling is ShoWest's latest male star of tomorrow. Much of this has to do with how in demand the 23-year-old actor has become. In 2004, he'll be seen in two films, "The United States of Leland," with Kevin Spacey and Don Cheadle, and "The Notebook," with Gena Rowlands and Joan Allen. In the can is "Stay," directed by Marc Forster ("Monster's Ball") and featuring Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor.
Also announced recently was Gosling being added to the cast of "Che," directed by Terrence Malick. Most actors would kill to work with the helmer who helped launch the careers of Charlie Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Richard Gere and Jim Caviezel. The project was postponed, however, and it might be a year before Gosling joins Benicio Del Toro and Javier Bardem on the biopic's Bolivian shoot.
In terms of heat, however, Gosling could have punched his ticket after wowing audiences with his first starring perf, as Jewish Nazi Danny Balint in Henry Bean's controversial "The Believer," which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2001. His widely heralded performance put him on the map.
"It was beautiful," he recalls. "It was like helium. It completely filled me up; I didn't really know that making movies could do that."
Next month, he'll be seen as yet another troubled teen in the Spacey-produced "The United States of Leland." Gosling describes his approach to the introverted character of Leland: "You could find ways to open up and let the audience see what's really going on, but the truth is that somebody who's as emotionally unaccessible as he is would never do that." He had to convey his feelings with subtlety: "You have to take the risk of being really boring in hopes of being realistic."
"Leland" director Matthew Ryan Hoge says Gosling's approach worked because "it's honesty. He made such a resolute effort to not rely on actors' tricks, to not perform, to not invite people in. He had to keep this wall up but at the same time, he suggested that there was something behind that wall, that there was another kid lurking there."
Noting that most of his characters have existed on the fringe of society, Gosling doubts his mainstream marketability due to the lack of teen fluff roles on his resume. "They tend to offer those kind of projects to those who will be commercially viable and I'm not one of those people," he says. "At the moment, I'm just happy to be doing what I'm doing."
Gosling only hopes that he can to continue play the kind of challenging roles he's chosen so far, "until I feel like I'm done and I don't have anything else to offer."
