CNN
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The premiere of Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” is still a year away, and yet Ryan Gosling has found a way to turn every press appearance into an excuse to get poetic about his next role as plastic toy boy Ken.
During an appearance this week on “The Tonight Show,” Gosling was eager (“Ken-ergetic,” perhaps) to discuss the untold story of how his casting as Ken was destined.
As Gosling recounts, some time ago director Gerwig offered Gosling the role of Ken. The screenplay was the “best… [he’d] never read,” he told host Jimmy Fallon, but he wanted to take a moment and think about the decision in the fresh air.
When he entered his garden, he discovered an otherwise immaculate, shirtless Ken doll, face down in the mud next to a “squashed lemon”, Gosling said.
Future Ken snapped a photo of the touching scene, possibly a sign from the universe, and texted it to Gerwig.
“I said, ‘I’ll be your Ken. Because his story needs to be told,” Gosling told Fallon.
And although the film recently wrapped, Gosling continues to name his beloved Mattel character wherever he goes, even when promoting his other projects, and he fiercely defends Ken against his critics.
“I was surprised how some people were kind of clenching their pearls about my Ken, like they had already thought about Ken a second before that!” said Gosling, pointing a fake angry, accusing finger. “They never played with Ken!”
Then the conversation turned dark and existential: “Nobody plays with Ken, man,” Gosling lamented. “It’s a prop, and not even one of the coolest.”
This isn’t the first time Gosling has considered the failings of Ken’s seemingly lavish life. In an interview earlier this month with Entertainment Tonight, Gosling said life in plastic is much harder than life as the fictional mercenary he plays in Netflix’s “The Gray Man.”
“Ken has no money, he has no job, he has no car, he has no house,” Gosling said in the earlier interview. “He goes through stuff.”
But the “Barbie” movie will be a lot more fun than Ken’s devastating descriptions of Gosling would suggest, he assured Fallon this week.
“These aren’t plot details; these are just objective facts about Ken,” he said. “It’s Ken’s life.”
Until “Barbie” hits theaters in July 2023, we can just hope that Gosling will continue to include Ken in all of his interviews for the foreseeable future.