Every day I wake up and there’s a new Ryan Gosling quote to fawn over where he’s saying something silly about starring as Ken in the upcoming Barbie movie. I’ve been a Gosling fan since I saw his powerful performance in Blue Valentine, but even as he moved into bigger-budget films, I’ve been impressed with the amount of himself he puts into every performance.
Whether it’s a rom-com like The Notebook or Crazy, Stupid, Love, a comedy like The Nice Guys, or a drama like Blade Runner 2049 or Drive, it’s evident that he’s all in no matter the role. This has manifested in his performance in Barbie as well, from all the trailers we’ve seen – he is earnest, takes it seriously, and is compellingly charismatic to an admirable degree. Even better, he’s taking that earnestness to red carpets and interviews, where he’s manifesting the most likeable, himbofied, Ken-adjacent version of himself to everybody that speaks to him.
I’ve been eating up the marketing for Barbie, something I resent myself deeply for. It’s just an IP movie, I tell myself, a huge rebrand for a product marketed to children, but everything I’ve seen about it has been so compelling that I can’t help myself. Gosling’s statements about the movie are only adding fuel to the fire. To one interviewer who asked him why he thought he had been cast as Ken, he replied, “It was like I was in my backyard and I was picking up a discarded Ken doll, and then magically I was that Ken Doll, and it was Greta Gerwig who was playing with me, and the only way back to the human world was to follow her very specific direction, and now I’m back.” To another journalist who asked how everybody could harness their own ‘Kenergy’, he said, “It’s there the whole time. You’ve got it so strong, I can feel it right now. Look no further, you are Kenough.” The journalist then compared Kenergy to WiFi as something that’s “all around you”, to which he replied, “Right. And it might be affecting the bees, somehow? I’m not sure.”
To yet another interviewer who asked him how he defines Kenergy, he said, “Very little is known about Kenergy. And we don’t have the funding for the research. We know that it’s real, you know, in my case it came on like a rash and then it turned into a tan, and then suddenly you’re shaving your legs and you’re bleaching your hair, and you’re wearing bespoke neon rollerblades.” He continued, “Hopefully if this film and the conversation starts, we can start sort of funding it and really finding out like, where, what is Kenergy?”
Every response he’s given so far has been, as we say online, unserious, and yet each one masterfully brings across the tone of the film and Gosling’s role in it, the silliness and light-heartedness of it. It’s as if Gosling went full method and became the most delightful himbo the world has ever seen instead of becoming, like some actors, assholes who terrorise their castmates. He’s leaning hard into his characterisation of Ken, and it’s brilliant marketing. Everybody loves it, because it’s not obnoxious, doesn’t seem forced, and it makes for great soundbites. It’s especially great in contrast with the much more serious and intellectual Oppenheimer junkets, since both movies are coming out on the same day and people are planning to double-feature them (it’s me, I’m people).
The contrast is absolutely delightful, as is Gosling. I’m wary of getting too parasocial about it – after all, it’s PR for an upcoming film, his job is to be delightful – but it still makes me happy to see actors having fun in interviews, saying silly things, and not taking things too seriously. It reminds me that though the film industry is a cog in a capitalist machine, it can still be fun. That’s a rare thing nowadays.