Ryan Gosling is restless. "Want to see the abandoned hotel around the corner?" he asks me. "You can bring the tape recorder if you want, but we should go while there's still light."
We've only known each other for a couple of hours and already he's suggesting we perform our first misdemeanor together. Which is how, moments later, I find myself crawling out his back window in the labyrinthine system of fire escapes that snake through the crumbling old city.
We stand for a moment on the rooftop of an adjacent building, admiring the view. Downtown LA is an area few Hollywood types have time for. It's crusty, and raw. It isn't much use to anyone in "the business" unless it's as a backdrop for some cops-and-robbers thrill ride. And though the historic downtown core has been slowly gentrifying, only a handful of hipsters and adventurous artist-types have taken up the call. You could live for years in this city without ever having the desire or the necessity to drive among the long-abandoned offices and hotels here. Gosling walks south over to the hotel, and, checking to see if anyone is watching, pries back the rusting steel bars on a nearby window. We hop through, and in one motion, we're in. El Dorado Hotel, tenth floor.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?"
I agree with him, but I'm lying. The carpet is shit-brown, the walls piss-yellow, and the floors are strewn with debris left behind by humans who've been using this place, one of the more storied hotels in LA history, as a squat for the past five years. The hotel was built in 1931. Charlie Chaplin lived here once, and David Bowie filmed once of his earlier music videos in the lobby. But more recently, this hotel struck an ominous note in local dramas. There are the stories of Herman Jackson and James Harding, two low-level gang members who met their fate here. In 1997, a Los Angeles newspaper reported that they were found in a room, tied together, one behind the other, strangled to death, after a dispute over some missing cocaine. Their pants were around their ankles, a final humiliation inflicted by their murderer, who earned a one-way trip to Death Row for his visit to the El Dorado. I'm hoping that, at the end of our visit, we'll leave under better circumstances, our pants firmly fastened around our waists.
Whether Gosling knows any of this or not is unclear. He walks ahead of me, by five paces, swinging open every door he passes, throwing his shoulder into the ones that stick. And, if one door leads to another, well, he tears through that one as well.
I lose sight of Gosling a few times but catch up to him as we hit the old hotel staircase. Without saying a word, he starts flying down the steps, one flight after another, me trailing behind, until we reach the lobby.
The first time you meet Ryan Gosling, you're struck immediately by his looks. The guy's rakishly thin, in that surfs-the-Pacific sort of way (which, incidentally, he doesn't). His jeans are ripped at the knee and thigh. The whites of his black high-top Converse are filthy. He has a two-week-old beard, which does little to age his twenty-two-year-old face. His shaggy blond hair is flattened down under a mesh-backed baseball cap emblazoned with cursive double Ss. He may or may not have had a shower today. All this and he still sports the aura of an altar boy. A very messy altar boy.
The second thing you notice is his waist-high, dirty-blond mutt, George, held tightly by the collar in Gosling's right hand. If he were to let go, George would need only two full steps to launch at your chest, knocking you down to his level for a full introduction, Marmaduke-style. And if you manage to notice anything beyond George, you might notice Gosling's eyes. They're blue. Stunningly so. And when they're open and boring right into you, you're pretty sure you're getting the straight dope. It's when he squints them away, grimacing, that you realize he's keeping something to himself.
Now, it should be said, Ryan Gosling's not super-famous, really. Not yet, anyway. He's not the type of guy whose mere attachment to a film causes producers to whip out their chequebooks and fans to cram into Internet chat rooms. He's an actor's actor, as they say, and if you know him already, it's probably because you've been paying attention. In fact, last December, Esquire called him "perhaps the most ferociously talented young actor of his generation," naming him one of the world's 40 Best and Brightest. Details described him as "the subversive rookie who shook up Sundance with his bravura work in The Believer." Entertainment Weekly praised his performance as "the most powerful piece of acting to hit Sundance in years." And Henry Bean, who wrote The Believer, told Vogue, "When I'm with him, I feel sure, not for the first time in my life that I'm in the presence of a genius." Some people, it seems, seriously believe in this kid.
Most fans began to fall for Gosling after his portrayal of Danny Balint, the self-hating Jew romanced by neo-Nazi culture in 2001's The Believer. The film cleaned up at the Sundance Film Festival that year and won Gosling his first real critical acclaim. Gosling's intense performance virtually stole the whole show right out from under the noses of veteran co-stars Billy Zane and Summer Phoenix. It was a tough act to follow.
Soon after, Gosling landed roles in The Slaughter Rule and Murder by Numbers, with Sandra Bullock, a so-so film hindered further by its unfortunate title. ("There's a joke between me and my friends that it was called 'Murder Eight-Y Num-Eight-ers,' because the executives changed all the Bs to 8s," says Gosling.) Despite the lack of box office success, Gosling's Hollywood stock got a brief injection when the supermarket rags began reporting that he was romantically linked to Bullock, a woman sixteen years his senior. "Yeah, I heard that rumor, too," says Gosling, insisting that it is not the truth. "We're just really good friends," he says. Sensing my skepticism, he winces those powerful blue eyes. "I just feel like you have to keep some things to yourself, you know." And that's that.
At this year's Sundance festival, Gosling appeared in The United States of Leland. He played the lead role of Leland, an emotionally confused teenager who allegedly murdered his girlfriend's autistic little brother. Kevin Spacey plays his father and Don Cheadle plays the juvenile-hall teacher who smells a book in Leland's story. Written by former social worker Matthew Ryan Hoge, it's a powerful film, with an equally powerful cast. If The Believer was his breakthrough role, Leland may prove to be his victory lap.
It's interesting though, that he nearly missed it altogether. Hoge, who also directed the film, wasn't initially interested in casting someone like Gosling. "His agent sent me a letter that said, 'I've got your Leland,'" says Hoge. "I certainly admired his work in The Believer, so I met with him. But he was too old, too big, just not right for the role at all." Hoge responded to Gosling's agent and said quite bluntly, "No, you don't." Gosling admits to being pretty persuasive, practically begging for a chance to read. Hoge gave in, and he was floored. "He knew the script backwards and forwards. He really knew how to get inside Leland's head. You could tell he really wanted that role," Hoge remembers.
"I guess I can be passionate," says Gosling about the eventual casting. "I would take passion over talent any day."
Gosling has spent the last ten of his twenty-two years as an actor. He was born in London, Ontario, and, for the first twelve years, he was raised a Mormon in Cornwall. "In many ways, it's a beautiful faith," he tells me. "My sister just recently finished her mission. But no," he says, anticipating my next question. "I don't consider myself religious." In Cornwall, Gosling floundered in school, a result, he supposes "of boredom." His father worked at Domtar, the town's paper mill, at the time. Gosling believes most of his affinity for entertainment came from his father, who plays guitar and is "something of a virtuoso, in his own way." Along the bare, brick walls of Gosling's LA loft are three fabulous guitars, including a steel guitar for belting out the blues.
Somehow Gosling got the acting bug first. "You know, it sounds silly, but it was the girls," he says, reaching for a Marlboro. "I was in this play--well not a play, more like an air band thing in the park--in Cornwall. And there was this girl that I was totally smitten with. Her name was Melanie. She was just, like, the belle of the ball. Everybody just loved looking at Melanie. And she had signed up for this air band thing. So I signed up too. And he ended up doing 'Uptown Girl,' the whole idea being that I would chase her around, and, at the end, I would go behind her umbrella and we'd kiss. So when the umbrella dropped, I'd have a big kiss mark on my cheek. I couldn't wrap my head around the idea that, you know, she wouldn't talk to me, but if we did this air band thing, she was gonna kiss me. And we were going to kiss all through rehearsals. And for the next month we were gonna kiss. What a deal, man."
Shortly after that, a casting call ran in The Cornwall Standard Freeholder for Disney's Mickey Mouse Club. Gosling convinced his parents to drive him to Montreal for the audition. "I just had no concept whatsoever that people were trying to do this for a living," he remembers. "I was just like, 'Oh well, I'll be in the Mickey Mouse Club. No big deal.'" And that's pretty much how it worked. He beat out 17,000 other kids for the part, and joined an elite consortium of future idols that included Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, and Keri Russell. "You know, I didn't really belong there. I couldn't really sing or dance," says Gosling. Instead, he was a self-confessed troublemaker, and was nearly kicked off the show on a couple of occasions for being too "sexual," as he puts it, at least for the likes of Disney. This is not to say he was actually doing anything sexual, simply that he and the other boys were engaging in a bit of pre-pubescent locker room talk. "I don't know why guys know more about sex than girls do at the age, but we did, and so we talked about it," says Gosling about the rumors that he taught Britney everything she knows about sex today, which can either be a little or a lot, depending on the source. "It was so much easier to blame it on me. So Ryan is the scapegoat and he's corrupting the kids. He's so sexual and yaddayaddayadda."
He sighs.
When the Mouse Club disbanded after two seasons, most of the mousketeers had recording contracts waiting for them. Gosling returned to Canada and ended up starring in another after-school diversion. Breaker High was a Vancouver-based show about a gang of trust-fund kids attending high school on a luxury liner. "It was definitely a blast," says Gosling, "And it's where I met some of the best friends I have to this day." Tyler Labine and Scotty Vickaryous, two of his co-stars from the series, are regular visitors at Gosling's loft. The pair even shows up during our interview. Vickaryous needs a tux for a black-tie wedding he's attending in Vancouver that week. It turns out that all Gosling has is a black suit. An argument erupts as to the actual meaning of "black tie."
"Black tie means tux," says Vickaryous. "Doesn't it?"
"It's fine," says Gosling, pointing with an unlit Marlboro at the wrinkled Hugo Boss number he's produced from a rack behind his kitchen. "It it's that important to you, just put a strip of electrical tape down each leg."
When Breaker High ended, Gosling was offered the title role on Young Hercules, the prequel (if you can believe there was one) to that Saturday afternoon version of Hercules with Kevin Sorbo. Gosling spent his seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays living in New Zealand. "You've heard that saying 'When God made the earth had a little bit of everything left over so he crammed it all down in the corner?' It's totally like that," says Gosling later, as we're pulling out of In-N-Out burger on Sunset Boulevard. I ask whether doing a show like Young Hercules felt a little below his level. "Naw," he says. "It was a lot of fun. I got to do special effects stuff where there would be this huge Samoan guy six times my size, rigged up so that when I tapped him in the chest he would fly back 45 feet. It was good for the self esteem, you know."
The lobby of the El Dorado hotel is giant. Above our heads, two stories up, hangs a pair of elaborate glass chandeliers. Climbing down the sweeping staircase from the mezzanine level, we're offered our first real glimpse of the hotel's former grandeur. The floor is tiled, and, through the dust, you can still make out the patterned mosaic. The hall is breathtaking, but fairly dark, the only light entering through the cracks between the plywood boards covering the front windows.
It dawns on me that, should we encounter any trouble in this room, the only escape we know of is through a window on the tenth floor. I think to mention this to Gosling, but I can't find him anywhere. Panic strikes. The tacos Gosling fed me for lunch that were so tasty four hours ago are gurgling in my stomach, and I know my digestive system is in a precarious state. If Gosling were to jump out from behind a shadow somewhere, I don't know what would happen. And I wouldn't put it past him at this point.
Finally, I hear him somewhere nearby, and then my eye finds him. Gosling ducks into a darkened room crammed with dusty and faded old wall hangings. I head in after him, slowly, but he's already slipped out through another passage. I can hear my heart beating as I feel my way through. I find him on the other side, fully unaware of my own drama, fingering a chest of ancient safety-deposit boxes. He is tearing through them systematically.
"What exactly are you looking for?"
"I dunno. Stuff." He pulls one of the boxes from its berth, rips the lid off, and offers it for my perusal. The look on his face makes me nervous. These are the things I prepare to discover at the bottom of this box: a crack pipe, a gun, a bloody knife, a million bucks, a pound of coke, a pound of flesh, something dead, something severed, or otherwise something I could never be prepared to see.
But when it arrives under my nose, I'm relived to discover that it's empty, save for a plastic fork.
We make our way up through the belly of the El Dorado, flight by flight. Gosling can't remember what floor we jumped in on. Neither can I. He just starts opening doors and heading through them. Most doors lead to nothing, maybe an old claw foot tub here, or a chipped mirror there. One particularly foreboding room is filled with dozens of doors. Large doors, thin doors, all off their hinges and propped up against one another. The room gives me a shudder. Gosling just pops his head in and shrugs.
We decide it's time to go. It's nearly seven o'clock and the light is fading.
It takes us twenty minutes to make our way back up the tenth floor, and a while longer to find the window we hopped in through. Pretty soon, we're rolling out the window and back onto the adjacent roof. Compared to the sweaty must of the hotel, the Los Angeles air is an olfactory light.
"You were scared, weren't you?" he asks. I feel like a kid again. It's as though I've just spent the afternoon with the loner in school who hangs out by the creek, poking fish with sharpened sticks. "I bet we could've found a body in there if we really wanted to," he says, grinning. I shrug, realizing that we were both looking for very different things in that hotel. I was looking for a sign or a moment that might explain why Gosling takes the roles he does, why he picks the hard ones, why he doesn't just follow his recent success to a series of American Pie-style blockbusters, settle down with a bubbly blond teen idol, and just ride out his youth, wild and free in the Hollywood Hills. It would be perfectly easy. He, on the other hand, was hoping he'd find something challenging in there, something, maybe, that might actually scare him.
On the way back to Hollywood, Ryan Gosling lists off the things he misses most about Canada. They are, in no particular order, President's Choice Decadent chocolate chip cookies, Crispy Crunch bars, Big Turks, Lick's hamburgers, and poutine. (A friend once FedExed him a package filled with real Canadian cheese curds.) We're working our way across town, in his beat-up Jeep Grand Cherokee, a purchase from the set of Murder by Numbers. It just barely runs. At least twice on our trip our to West Hollywood, the car stalls mid-intersection and Gosling casually throws it into neutral and restarts the ignition.
"You know, there's a lot of serious, angry animosity directed at Canadians right now in LA," Gosling says, referring to the film workers' unions that are rallying to keep productions south of the border. "I remember going to the craft services truck on one of the sets I was working on and there was a big sticker of the Canadian flag with a red slash through it. Well, I wouldn't go in. I had them take it off. It was offensive. That's our flag, and if we had done that to an American flag in Canada, it would be a seriously big deal."
Gosling chalks up some of his success here in the US to necessity. It's really very hard to get a working visa if you want to be an actor. You have to land a role that is big enough to justify the studio using its muscle to get the permit for you. "That's the reason Canadians and Australians are doing so well here. It's because they have no option except to starve and wait for that lead role. And then, once you get the lead in one thing, you get the lead in something else, and so on." He make it all seem very simple, and, in some ways, it is. Gosling doesn't have to hustle himself all over this city anymore, begging directors to give him a chance. The director Nick Cassavetes approached Gosling about playing a lead role in The Notebook, a 1940's-era romance being released in 2004 (just before Leland). "He asked to see me," says Gosling. "It was certainly a genre I'm not familiar with. Nick wasn't either, so it felt like we were going into this one together." It's also the first time Gosling will get amorous, really amorous, with a woman onscreen.
In the film, Gosling plays a young carpenter who falls in love shortly before leaving for war. When he returns, he attempts to rekindle the passion he shared with his girl, played by Rachel McAdams, a native of St. Thomas, Ontario. Film buffs may note that, while researching the role, Gosling actually built the kitchen table at which the triumphant reunion/love scene begins, and continues on top of, before migrating through other areas of the house. It's one big, long, intense love scene, and Gosling says he'd be surprise if it made it to the film in its entirety. "But I was proud of that table. More than I was of the work I did on that table," he jokes.
"It really was very nice," says McAdams. "There I was, sipping tea at the table, with the carpenter himself." And--ahem--the love scene? "Oh, of course we were nervous, but I remember he came up to me beforehand and asked, 'Is there anything I can't do to you?' And I was like, 'I don't know, what are you planning to do?'"
Quite a few directors seem to want to challenge Gosling these days. In fact, the same day I fly back to Toronto, Gosling is driving up the coast to Napa Valley. He's been invited by Francis Ford Coppola to spend a few days at his vineyard, reading for a monumental script the Godfather director has been hammering out over the past few years. Gosling throws things like this into the conversation casually, as though every kid from Cornwall should be relaxing on the ranch of one of America's most revered directors, at least once in a while.
"Yeah, I'm a little nervous, I guess. But he's letting me bring George," he reasons. "George'll like that." And when he returns he might focus his attention on one or two other scripts he's looking through. One is a project of Benicio Del Toro's called Che, about Che Guevara. Del Toro wants Gosling to play Colonel Benigno Ramirez, a white Cuban who fought at Che's side and was one of the few to survive the revolution. The pair is making tentative plans to visit the jungle in Bolivia with Ramirez, to learn a few survival skills first-hand.
The other project Gosling is eyeing is an adaptation of the book A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. It's a tough account of the author's struggles with, and eventual victory over, his drug and alcohol addiction. Its first three sentences find the disoriented protagonist sitting on a plane, coming to. His four front teeth are missing, he has a hole in his cheek, his nose is broken, and his eyes are swollen shut. "Of course, I'd have my front teeth pulled if I do that one," says Gosling. He's not blinking.
"What?"
"I'd have to pull them out. I wouldn't do this role with black tape over them. I looked into it, and I can get them pulled, or I think I could have them filed down to the roots and then use make up to do the rest."
"Dude," I say, "those are your teeth you're talking about."
"They make fake teeth. Everyone in my family has fake teeth." I start paying closer attention to his teeth. They're actually not that good. Not for a movie star, anyway.
"But what about computer graphics?" I ask. He just winces and shakes his head, as though what I'm saying is ridiculous. Who the hell is going to yank four prime-real-estate teeth for a silly little movie, I think. But Henry Bean, who wrote and directed The Believer, tells me not to underestimate Gosling. "Ryan gives himself over completely to the character, without holding anything back, without judging the character from the outside. Often when you see actors play less than exemplary people, you can see them winking from inside the role. Ryan never does any of that." McAdams concurs, and adds that, as far as Gosling's career goes, one thing is certain: "It's going to be unconventional. Whatever he does, he's going to dip deep, and find something weird, something special, probably something you maybe didn't want him to find."
The next day Gosling drives me back to Hollywood. We don't speak much along the way. He drops me off in front of Mann's Chinese Theatre. It's the polar opposite of downtown Los Angeles. This is where people come to catch a glimpse of someone famous. Gosling doesn't have much interest in sticking around. He asks if I'm all right here, if I want him to come back and pick me up in an hour or so. I assure him I'll be fine. As he drives away, back towards the dingy comfort of his loft, I wonder where he's going. He's only twenty-two, and though he's building an impressive list of credits, he could just as easily slip up. He could take the wrong role and fall into obscurity forever. Will he continue to cement his path to greatness, as a Billy Crudup or a Sam Rockwell, or will he fall off the wagon somewhere, as Owen Wilson did, and find his own Shanghai Noon? Two weeks later, I'm reminded that the chances of this are slim. An e-mail arrives in my inbox, from a sage-like Kevin Spacey, Gosling's co-star and producer in The United States of Leland: "'The Gosling qua is of a stature that defies comparison. I can only predict that one day a young writer such as yourself will get that big assignment: to write the cover story on a new actor, and find himself comparing his subject to the young Ryan Gosling. And the circle will be complete."
I remember asking Gosling, in his loft the day before, why he seemed so ill at ease during the interview portions of our visit. "I find them uncomfortable," he said. "Most of the time, you're either talking about personal stuff, which doesn't matter, or you're talking about work. And I guess it's only interesting to me to read about people who really have a right to talk about acting. But certainly young actors, or people who are new to it, they just have no right to be talking about it."
I asked him if he thinks he'll ever have that right. He didn't hesitate, and his two-word response traveled through the room like a bolt, is blue eyes once again boring into me, not a flicker of doubt in his mind.
