Why Ryan Gosling Originally Turned Down The Part Of Ken
His portrayal of the beach-protecting, Barbie-loving Ken and his power anthem "I'm Just Ken" has now become a pop culture phenomenon, but Ryan Gosling initially turned down the role. For director Greta Gerwig, however, there was no alternative. She even wrote it into the script, where the main Ken is identified throughout as "Ken Ryan Gosling." Gerwig told SiriusXM that she and Margot Robbie sent Gosling numerous texts and promised daily presents on set to try and convince him.
"He absolutely passed," Robbie told Variety, but she and Gerwig persevered. "Every time he's like, 'I'm not doing this,' we were like, 'We are doing it, and it's going to be fun.'" As Gosling himself explained, one of main barriers was the classic Hollywood problem of scheduling conflicts: "There were actual reasons why I couldn't do the film. Schedule things. Life things."
But another reason for Gosling's trepidation was the difficulty of approaching the character. "It's the hardest role I've ever had to play," Gosling admitted, which is hard to believe when he's played such hard-hitting roles like a blue-collar worker with a deteriorating marriage in "Blue Valentine" or a philosophically twisted Jewish neo-Nazi in "The Believer." In her Actors on Actors interview with Cillian Murphy, Margot Robbie said to faced similar challenges in preparing to play a toy-based character:
"It was almost like all of my usual tools didn't apply for this character because she was invented out of a vacuum and lived in a — so all the things I normally did, didn't work. The animal work didn't work. The childhood memories didn't work. Even the accent wasn't something I could cling on to."
Since Barbie and Ken were blank slates with little to no inner life, it was surely a daunting task to get that across on screen while also making them likable. It would take a humorous incident through the eyes of a child for Ryan Gosling to willingly step into Ken's beach shorts.
Finding the perfect Ken-ergy
On "The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon," Gosling shared "the strange omen" that finally made him accept the role of Ken. He discovered a Ken doll face-down in the mud alongside a squashed lemon in his backyard, abandoned from where his two young daughters had been playing. Gosling texted the sad tableau to Greta Gerwig, declaring, "I shall be your Ken, for his story must be told."
Despite his initial reservations, Gosling proved to be a perfect fit for the role of Ken, and his Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination is well-deserved. Although he cut his acting teeth on intense indie dramas like "Drive" and "Half Nelson," he also brings a theatrical flair and sharp humor to some of his lighter roles. This versatility stems from his background as a competitive dancer, where he was plucked from his small Canadian town to join "The All-New Mickey Mouse Club." He showcased his song-and-dance abilities in the classic Hollywood musical homage "La La Land."
"I've always thought of him as a secretly comedic actor. His comedy goes back to taking it incredibly seriously as an actor, where he never is doing it just for the laugh," Gerwig observed to Rolling Stone, completely nailing what makes Ryan Gosling so great as Ken. Gosling has that very specific theatre-kid sensibility, or "Ken-ergy," where the humor comes from not being afraid to go big, to fully commit and be seriously invested in the given circumstances — no matter how off-the-wall or silly they may be. Gerwig's instincts were spot-on in recognizing that only Ryan Gosling could bring this role to life, and thankfully, he eventually agreed to take on the part.