Ryan Gosling's Bleach Blonde Barbie Look Was A Last Minute Decision
You can tell a lot about a Ryan Gosling character by his hair. In Derek Cianfrance's "The Place Beyond the Pines," the actor's motorcycle stunt driver Luke's bleached mop speaks to his immaturity when the story begins in the late '90s (a time in which his hairdo would've been considered quite fashionable among the youths, I swear it's true!). Compare that to Gosling's replicant cop K in Denis Villeneuve's "Blade Runner 2049," whose haircut is pragmatic and unflashy. It befits his personality yet it's almost too tidy, as though he's a kid playing at being a grown-up ... or, in K's case, at being "a real boy," to quote his holographic AI girlfriend Joi (Ana de Armas).
Like K, Gosling's Ken ends up having an existential crisis as he comes to ponder who he truly is and what he's meant to do with his life in "Barbie." But he's even more like Luke, in that he, too, is fairly juvenile, has bleach-blonde locks, and ends up causing a whole lot of problems after a life-changing discovery leads him down a dark path due in no small amount to his flawed grasp of masculinity. "The Place Beyond the Pines" and "Barbie" are basically the same movie, that's what I'm getting at.
Okay, not really, but Ken and Luke have a remarkable amount in common when you take a closer look at them. Perhaps that's why Gosling knew just what to do upon realizing his original Ken wig didn't look right shortly before production on "Barbie" got underway.
A little less Redford, a little more Leigh
While I am in no way /Film's resident "Barbie" expert, I know enough to assert that Ken has had various hairdos in his animated film appearances over the years. In particular, his wavy fringes in "Toy Story 3" bring to mind a young Robert Redford circa "The Sting" or even "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." It would seem that Gosling, "Barbie" director Greta Gerwig, and her creative team initially had something similar in mind for the character's live-action debut, too.
"I had this almost Redford wig, they called it," Gosling told Variety in an extensive post-Oscar nominations profile. It wasn't working for him, though. "I looked at the screen test, and I thought it wasn't Ken. I looked like I worked at Shutters or something," the actor continued. Instead, he found what he was looking for in another acting legend: Jennifer Jason Leigh. I'll let Gosling take it from here:
"I thought, 'Ken is "Single White Female"-ing Barbie.' So he would try to dye his hair, even though he can't dye his hair. I thought, 'I should bleach my hair, but it should be an off version of hers.'"
That's a pretty darn perfect psychological breakdown of Ken in "Barbie," which just further goes to show how much Gosling was born to play this role. His bleached 'do also helped Gosling get back into the mindset of his early days as a child star, which he's previously admitted was an essential part of his acting process on the film. "What was weird was I ended up looking like I did at eight or 12, which was the era I was revisiting anyway," he observed.
Perhaps it actually was his destiny to live and die a life of blonde fragility after all.