BEVERLY HILLS— Ryan Gosling is a man with love and Rachel McAdams on his mind.
The quiet-spoken actor, who starred with fellow Canadian McAdams in the sentimental The Notebook, is on the lookout for scripts for more romantic films they can make together.
"I like love stories," he said. "What pulls me is love and the lack of it and our need for it. We all want it and we don't know how to get it."
Gosling, 25, does not have that problem. He's been romantically involved with McAdams since they first met on the set of The Notebook two years ago.
"She is one of the kindest people I have ever met and I think that her kindness is something that inspires me," he said. "We spend as much time as we can together. We are always looking for movies we can do together but we just haven't found anything yet."
Strangely, it was only when they began dating that they realized, not only were they both from London, Ont., they were born in the same hospital there.
"I never knew Rachel when I was in London because my father was a travelling salesman for a paper mill and we moved around a lot," he said.
While Ryan left home at 17 to head for Hollywood, he returns frequently to his home province, drawn by the fact both his mother and McAdams still live there. "I think the fact that we come from the same place and have a lot in common helps," he said. "In this town, it is nice to have roots in common."
We were talking in a plush suite in a Beverly Hills hotel, only a few kilometres away from his rented apartment in a scruffy area of downtown L.A. The bearded Gosling, who wore a blue denim shirt and a flat cloth cap, is a man who avoids the fashionable Hollywood hot spots and is clearly more at home in grittier and more down-to-earth environments.
He believes his upbringing has gone a long way to keep him grounded and in touch with reality.
"Being Canadian gives you a little bit of an outsider's perspective," he said thoughtfully. "Canada's a really beautiful country and it was nice to grow up in such a multicultural place where racial differences never really entered my mind. I went to kindergarten with people of every colour of the rainbow and my first crush was on an Indian girl."
His film choices have echoed his aversion for the Hollywood mainstream and he has opted to appear mainly in low-budget, independent movies that rely on creativity and imagination rather than special effects and multiple takes.
Since his galvanizing performance as a self-hating neo-Nazi Jew in The Believer won him acting credibility in 2001, he has appeared in such offbeat dramas as The United States of Leland, Stay and his latest film, Half Nelson, which cost $700,000 to make.
He made an exception for the studio-produced Murder by Numbers, in which he starred with his then-girlfriend Sandra Bullock, and for The Notebook because, he said, "it was about a guy who loved a girl and that is something I can relate to."
The lure of money and power that attracts so many young actors has no appeal to him. "I absolutely will not become a pawn of the Hollywood studios," he said, laughing, "but that doesn't mean I won't do a studio movie. I have before and I will again."
For his role as the drug-addicted teacher in Half Nelson, Gosling spent most of his time in a Brooklyn classroom teaching real students lessons he had prepared the previous evening.
Although he found keeping the children's attention a major challenge, the experience was a far happier one than his own school days, growing up in Cornwall, Ont.
"I had a difficult time," he said. "I went to many schools and had many teachers." His parents had divorced and he felt lost and alone. He was frequently beaten up and he had trouble learning to read and write.
Eventually he was placed in a special education class until his mother, Donna, removed him from school and taught him at home.
"She had a really profound effect on me," he said. "I'm going to be emotional now. Thank God for my mother.
"As I get older, I realize that my upbringing was a little strange. Ever since I could talk, my mother always asked me what I thought about things and it was important to her that I had my own ideas. She gave me the power to control my own destiny."
Gosling began his show business career by performing with his older sister at local talent shows. In 1993, his big break came when he was chosen over 17,000 other young hopefuls to join the Disney Channel's revival of the Mickey Mouse Club. Even as a Mouseketeer, he and his mother would clash with executives if they thought something was not right.
"If there was a problem, most parents would just bow down because they were terrified their kids would lose their position on the show, but my mother would get right in their faces," he said.
Gosling became a teen pin-up when he was cast as Young Hercules in the short-lived television series and he had his first big-screen role as one of the football players in the drama Remember the Titans. Then came The Believer and suddenly Gosling was on every critic's list of hot new actors.
Gosling picks his projects carefully. After starring in The Notebook he did not make a movie for a year and a half waiting for a script he liked. He will begin work this fall on Lars and the Real Girl, in which he plays a lonely, delusional young man who has an unconventional relationship with a lifelike doll he finds on the Internet. As well, he'll co-star with Benicio Del Toro and Javier Bardem in Che, a biographical film on the last years of Che Guevara.
It would seem that with McAdams as his girlfriend, the freedom to pick and choose his projects and the acclaim of the critics, Gosling has everything a young actor could want.
But for the intense and ever-questioning Gosling, nothing is that simple.
"Sometimes I'm happy when I should be sad, sometimes I'm sad when I should be happy and sometimes I don't feel anything when I should," he said.
