Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Given that Ryan Gosling is up there with the biggest movie stars on the planet right now, has an impossibly glamorous wife in Eva Mendes, and more cash than Scrooge McDuck at the start of that old cartoon, you wouldn’t imagine he’d live with a life-size sex doll, but that hasn’t always been the case.
At the moment, you could put together a cogent argument for Gosling being the most in-demand male actor in Hollywood. Obviously, he’s ridiculously good-looking, but he’s also insanely talented at what he does. He can carry a film single-handed, and mega-budget ones too, as this year’s excellent comedy sci-fi Project Hail Mary showed perfectly.
And that isn’t a common ability to have; studios do not risk budgets of $100million plus on any old actors, it’s too much of a gamble. Brad Pitt can do it, Margot Robbie can do it, Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks could do it in the 1990s, and these days, if you want to guarantee bums on cinema seats, you need a Gosling. Therefore, next year he’ll be the lead in the big new Star Wars franchise movie, Starfighter, which is going to cost an obscene amount of money to make, but will bring in about the gross domestic product of a small nation at the box office.
20 years ago, however, Gosling was not the household name he is now. He was far from an unknown, the classic (although not actually very good) weepy The Notebook made sure of that, but he had yet to have a real global money-spinner. He had shown in 2006 that he had something about him as an actor that critics noticed was unusually impressive, thanks to his performance as a drug-addicted teacher in the drama Half-Nelson, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actor’.
Despite being a former Disney Channel starlet along the lines of Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, Gosling evidently had more to him; he wanted to take on movies that were genuinely different and challenging, and that was underlined the following year when he signed up for 2007’s Lars and the Real Girl, the comedy about a young man who becomes obsessed with an anatomically-correct sex doll called Bianca. Although audiences didn’t go crazy for the offbeat film, he put in a totally committed, Golden Globe-nominated performance.
So committed was he that he even took the doll home with him after filming and kept her in a room upstairs in his house overlooking the garden. Gosling told The Telegraph about his decision to pose the anthropomorphic pleasure bot with a book and a coffee cup, saying, “Bianca is very much like a teddy bear to me. She feels like a security blanket. My relationship with her is the same as a child’s relationship with their bear. It is intimate, and they love it, care for it and talk to it. If they ever lost the bear, it would be traumatic for them.”
Which is…something. It’s probably a good thing Gosling eventually met Mendes, let’s put it that way. As for how he established a working practice for filming opposite a pretend woman who couldn’t speak, he added, “I ran dialogue with her, like we were in our own silent movie. She would ‘talk’, and I would talk. We’d have fights. I know it sounds crazy, but Bianca became fascinating, and that’s why I have taken her home and put her upstairs.”
While you might imagine a lot of the other cast and crew might be looking over at this and either backing away slowly, all calling helplines, the actor was convinced that everyone else was under the spell of the sex doll too, explaining, “At one point I would see a grip on his own with a cup of coffee next to Bianca, sitting talking to her”.
OK, Ryan.
