Ryan Gosling’s 10 Best Performances

The one considerable blemish on Ryan Gosling’s otherwise impressive acting resume was that, like Tom Cruise, he’d never worked with a female director. That changed with his go-for-broke turn in Barbie, director Greta Gerwig’s Trojan horse of a movie about toxic masculinity and the corrosive effects of the patriarchy. The 42-year-old Canadian is earning raves for his dancing, singing, swaggering Ken, the lowly “boyfriend” to Barbie (Margot Robbie) who transforms overnight from a friendzoned himbo who only knows “Beach” to an angry incel hellbent on ruling Barbieland.

Gosling, with his platinum blond hair, toned abs, and ridiculous style, is the ultimate accessory, and his hilariously committed performance is not only earning Oscar buzz, but it also prompted the folks over at Vanity Fair to wonder aloud whether it was his “best performance ever.” That got us thinking: What are the 10 best Ryan Gosling performances?

Without further ado, here they are.

10. ‘Crazy, Stupid, Love’

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The first time Gosling flexed his muscles for comedic effect — just a few weeks prior to doing so IRL, breaking up a fight on the streets of NYC in a sun’s out, guns out tank — was in this ensemble comedy film from Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. Gosling is so deadpan hilarious as Jacob Palmer, a pickup artist who goes to the same club every night in a bespoke suit to seduce lonely women, and takes on Cal (Steve Carell), a pathetic, midlife-crisis-suffering, Gap-wearing father who just found out his wife (Julianne Moore) was cheating on him, as a makeover project, that you resent whenever the film strays from his judgmental gaze. While his scenes with Emma Stone are cute, including a drunken re-creation of the Dirty Dancing dance, his two-handed comedy with Carell is top-notch. The look he shoots Carell’s Cal when he unveils his Velcro wallet was rightfully memed to oblivion. For those who never saw his teenage work in Breaker High or Young Hercules, this was Gosling’s first big comedy swing, and he knocked it out of the park.

9. ‘The Notebook’

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I still think about how Gosling almost starred with his Mickey Mouse Club accomplice, Britney Spears, in The Notebook. And also how Gosling and his eventual co-star, Rachel McAdams, reportedly hated each other so much while shooting The Notebook that it devolved into a shouting match — before they got romantic and started dating during the film’s promotional tour. That fieriness is present in his Noah Calhoun, a working-class fella in 1940 South Carolina who has eyes for stuck-up heiress Allie (McAdams), much to her parents’ chagrin. The early meet-cute scenes of Gosling and McAdams have that old-school charm, and Gosling has a knack for conveying brooding desire, but that scene in the rain — “I wrote you every day for a year … it wasn’t over … it still isn’t over” — is the one that will endure.

8. ‘La La Land’

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Anyone familiar with his late-night appearances (or YouTube) knows that Gosling came up as a child dancer, first in a local dance troupe, then ballet, and then a revival of The Mickey Mouse Club alongside some folks you may have heard of: Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, and Christina Aguilera. But we never saw him truly channel his years of training till La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s movie musical about two Angeleno strivers. Sure, there are some moments that haven’t held up well (Gosling mansplaining jazz to Emma Stone in a club; the only Black character, played by John Legend, as the one bastardizing jazz), but he does it all here: sings, dances in the moonlight, shoots his paramour that broken, puppy-dog look. His voice isn’t nearly as strong as Stone’s, and neither is his performance, but it’s still a delight.

7. ‘Blue Valentine’

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As the story goes, Gosling and his co-star, Michelle Williams, showed an extraordinary level of commitment to Blue Valentine, even going so far as renting a home and living as a couple, simulating arguments, in order to prep for their roles as a young couple who fall in love only to have it be lost in a sea of resentment and insecurity five years later. While the unraveling sequences fall a bit short in parts, and Gosling’s bald cap is both unintentionally funny and surprisingly depressing, those early ones of Gosling pulling out all the stops on the streets of New York City to win over Williams — almost entirely improvised by the pair — including a ukulele serenade, is him at his charming best.

6. ‘Lars and the Real Girl’

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These is a woundedness Gosling instills in many (or all) of his characters. I’ve said it’s akin to a puppy dog before, but that longing look, one of his eyes slightly lazier than the other, has the power to pierce right through you. As Lars Lindstrom, a damaged soul whose mother died during childbirth, leaving him with feelings of guilt, detachment, and haphephobia; whose father died recently; and who lives in his family’s converted garage, Gosling gave us his most eccentric character — a broken young man who simulates a relationship with Bianca, a sex doll he ordered online, because he’s too afraid of forming real, meaningful connections. It’s a remarkable, understated turn from Gosling who, no matter how weird it gets, makes you root for Lars every step of the way. And it sounds like Gosling fully understood the assignment.

“Ryan turned up 20-30 pounds overweight — with a mustache — a week and a half before the shoot,” director Craig Gillespie told Entertainment Weekly. “I wasn’t expecting it. We hadn’t really talked about it, but I appreciated it and I appreciated why he was doing it.”

5. ‘The Nice Guys’

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Like him and Carell in Crazy, Stupid, Love, or his press tour with Harrison Ford for Blade Runner 2049, Gosling pairs well with an older, more seasoned actor. Theirs is a chaotic brand of cross-generational comedy with all its accompanying admiration and indignation. And it’s never been on greater display than in The Nice Guys, filmmaker Shane Black’s Seventies-set buddy action comedy that sees Gosling in full screwball mode as Holland March, an incompetent private eye on the trail of a missing porn star who finds himself smack in the middle of a city-wide conspiracy. The juxtaposition of Gosling’s lily-livered, bumbling gumshoe and Russell Crowe’s muscle-for-hire badass is comedy gold, and never better than the scene where Crowe confronts him while he’s reading a newspaper on the toilet. The man should do comedy more often!

4. ‘Drive’

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While Gosling has targeted Netflix’s The Gray Man as his action franchise, we should have been treated to a trilogy of films about The Driver, an unnamed Hollywood stunt/getaway wheelman with a fetish for speed (and ultraviolence). Gosling and director Nicolas Winding Refn set out to make, in the star’s words, “a violent John Hughes movie,” and they succeeded with this stylish, pulsating neo-noir. This is far and away Gosling’s sexiest on-screen performance, with the actor fully harnessing his powers of stoicism, smirk, and sartorial splendor (that satin jacket, those leather gloves …), and ratcheting the faux Brooklyn accent up to 11. He’s so charming and easy on the eyes — even when he’s bashing someone’s face in — that you almost forget Carey Mulligan is somehow playing a Denny’s waitress in DTLA with an ex-con boyfriend. It’s his stab at Steve McQueen, and it’s so terribly cool.

3. ‘Barbie’

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It took working with his first female director (and a brilliant one at that) for Gosling to fully unearth his “Kenergy,” or to summon the most toxically male traits buried within him for comedy ridicule. It’s as feverishly committed a comedy turn as you’re likely to see this year (or any year), as Gosling brings this paragon of male buffoonery to thrillingly entertaining life. He sings, he dances, he deadpans, and, even as a himbo troglodyte with a penchant for fur coats, headbands, and subjugating women, is somehow never unlikable. Because you can tell he’s having so much fun as Ken. He’ll likely win his first Oscar for this, and it will be well-deserved. More Ken, please.

2. ‘The Believer’

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I’d caught Gosling in a few projects before — Breaker High and Young Hercules, that episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?, as a racist, entitled cornerback who can’t handle man coverage in Remember the Titans — but it wasn’t until seeing him in The Believer that I knew he was a shining talent. He plays Danny Balint, a New York Jew whose rejection of scripture and self-hatred has transmogrified him into a violent neo-Nazi. He and a gang of other skinhead-fascists are planning to plant a bomb in a synagogue in order to fulfill their hate-filled fantasy of killing Jews. Playing a neo-Nazi was an odd rite of passage for young, fearless actors for a time, from Gary Oldman and Russell Crowe to Edward Norton and Stephen Graham, but Gosling’s turn here is the most nuanced of the bunch, rife with internal conflict and crackling charisma. The scene where he’s interviewed by a New York Times journalist in a diner, spewing antisemitic bile one moment and threatening to kill himself if he’s exposed in the next, is one of the finest acted of Gosling’s career. A star was born.

1. ‘Half Nelson’

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While The Notebook made him a star, it was his turn in 2006’s Half Nelson that cemented Gosling’s status as arguably the most talented actor of his generation. He is Dan Dunne, a young middle-school history teacher in Brooklyn to a class of Black and brown students. Instead of adhering to the curriculum, he prefers learning via dialectics, encouraging his kids to voice their opinions. While a beloved teacher who also coaches the girl’s basketball team, he’s also harboring a crack addiction that’s starting to affect his job. When one of his students, 13-year-old Drey (Shareeka Epps), catches him hitting the pipe in a bathroom stall after a game, the look of abject terror he gives her is haunting, yet soon gives way to an unlikely friendship. This is one of those live-wire performances from a rising thesp, like De Niro in Mean Streets or Denzel in Cry Freedom, that loudly announces the arrival of an actor destined for greatness. It’s also another example of how generous a screen partner Gosling can be. He has no problem deferring to women, be it Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine and Emma Stone in La La Land to Margot Robbie in Barbie, and leaves some heavy lifting to newcomer Epps here. A scene in the film that epitomizes the complexity of Gosling’s work is when he tries to stand up to Frank (Anthony Mackie), a local drug dealer who’s taken Drey under his wing. It is played so remarkably true to life it will leave you in awe. 

From Rolling Stone US.