By Sara Bright
Ryan Gosling is 45.
You read a sentence like that, and you have to pause. Because for a huge number of people, Ryan Gosling is frozen in time. He is forever Noah in The Notebook, twenty-something and windswept, yelling at Rachel McAdams in the rain. That film, back in 2004, wasn’t just a hit. It was a cultural event. It launched him into a particular kind of stardom, the kind that comes with posters on teenage bedroom walls. The romantic lead. The sensitive heartthrob.
And the story of his career since then has been a long, quiet, and fascinating negotiation with that initial image.
At first, you look at the career, and it seems to split into two neat halves. On the one hand, you have the Gosling who leans into the charm. The sweet, funny guy in romcoms like Crazy, Stupid, Love. The swooning, old-fashioned movie star in La La Land. This is the Gosling the studios love. Bankable, handsome, charming. He turns up, flashes that sad, knowing little smile, and the audience melts.
But then there’s the other Gosling. The Gosling of the silence.
And this, really, is the more interesting one.
I remember seeing Drive for the first time in 2011. I knew him from The Notebook, from a few other things. And I was completely unprepared for what he did in that film. Or rather, for what he didn’t do. He barely speaks. The entire character is built out of stillness. Out of the way he looks, the way he holds himself. It’s a performance of pure, coiled-spring tension. He’s a man who feels like he could either kiss you or kill you, and he’s not sure which it’s going to be. It was a revelation. It was the moment you realised that behind the handsome movie-star face, there was a proper, serious, and slightly dangerous actor at work.
And once you see that Gosling, you start to see him everywhere. In The Place Beyond the Pines, another collaboration with Derek Cianfrance, who directed him in the devastating Blue Valentine. As the motorcycle stuntman turned bank robber, he’s all bleached-blond swagger and bad tattoos, but underneath it, there’s this deep, wounded sadness. A sense of a man trying to outrun his own fate.
Even his performance as Neil Armstrong in First Man is a masterclass in this kind of restraint. How do you play one of the most famous men in history? A man who is a symbol of American triumph? Most actors would go for the big, heroic gestures. Gosling goes the other way. He plays Armstrong as a man hollowed out by grief. A man who goes to the moon not because he’s a hero, but because he’s trying to get as far away from his own pain as he possibly can. The most powerful moment in that entire film is a moment of pure silence, as he stands on the lunar surface. It’s a performance of staggering, heartbreaking interiority. And it was, of course, completely misunderstood and largely ignored. People wanted the hero. They didn’t want the quiet, broken man.
So what is it that connects these two Goslings? The charming romantic and the silent brooder?
Maybe it’s a sense of melancholy. Even at his most charming, in La La Land or Crazy, Stupid, Love, there’s a sadness in his eyes. A sense that he knows the joke is funny, but he also knows it won’t last. It’s what makes his romantic roles so effective. He’s not just a handsome guy. He’s a handsome guy who looks like he’s had his heart broken a few times.
And then, of course, there’s Ken.
His performance in Barbie was, in its own way, as much of a risk as Drive. He took a role that could have been a one-note joke – the himbo boyfriend – and he turned it into a tragicomic masterpiece. A portrait of a man, or a doll, who has no identity of his own, who only exists in relation to someone else. His journey from cheerful sidekick to patriarchal buffoon and then, finally, to a state of existential self-awareness is the funniest, and in some ways the most moving, part of that entire film. He’s not afraid to look ridiculous. And that, for a man who has built a career on being one of the coolest actors on the planet, is a sign of real confidence.
So what does the future hold? There’s a story going around that he’s given up heavy dramatic roles for a while, to keep the mood light at home with his wife, Eva Mendes, and their two daughters. And you can see why. Who would want to bring the darkness of a film like Blue Valentine home with them every night?
But you have to hope it’s not a permanent retirement from the shadows. Because that’s where he does his most interesting work. As good as he is at being the charming movie star, it’s the other Gosling, the quiet one, the one who can say more with a single, held glance than most actors can with a page of dialogue, who is the real artist.
He’s managed to do something very rare. He’s a global movie star who still feels like a bit of an enigma. A man who can command a huge blockbuster, and then retreat into the quiet intensity of an independent film. He’s built a career not on a brand, but on a series of surprising, intelligent, and often very brave, choices. And at 45, you get the feeling he’s only just getting started.
