How Ryan Gosling found the positives in the worst movie he ever made: “I think that’s great”
Ryan Gosling knows how to make a successful movie.
In terms of critical praise, his work for directors like Denis Villeneuve, Damien Chazelle, and Nicolas Winding Refn routinely score very highly, while on a financial front, he was a major part of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, an all-conquering billion-dollar juggernaut, but unfortunately, he doesn’t always get it right.
Gangster Squad, his oft-forgotten third collaboration with Emma Stone, received much, much worse reviews than Crazy, Stupid, Love or La La Land, and he’s also participated in his fair share of stupid action movies, such as Netflix’s instantly forgettable The Gray Man. While nobody is fortunate enough to never make a stinker, at least some of Gosling’s shoddier output has the decency to be interesting.
One of the Canadian’s most fascinating failures is Marc Forster’s 2005 psychological thriller Stay, which was penned by future Game of Thrones bigwig David Benioff, and saw Gosling play a mentally unstable man named Henry who seeks assistance from psychologist Dr Sam Foster, played by Ewan McGregor. Henry, an aspiring artist, admits to hearing voices and being capable of predicting future events, whereas Foster attempts to reach the source of his visions before his young patient takes his own life.
Also starring Naomi Watts, the trailer for Stay presented itself as incredibly artsy and self-serious, blending obscure dialogue from the film with mysterious imagery and complicated camera movements, clearly indicating that at least some inspiration was taken from Watts’ old pal David Lynch, but unfortunately, few people, and especially Marc Foster, can come close to replicating the Lynchian lens.
Stay bombed in every sense of the word, with critics finding little to be positive about, pointing out its overly complicated storyline and lack of real substance. At the box office, things were even worse, as it recouped a measly $8.4million of its insane $50m budget, but at least Gosling wasn’t caught off guard when the poor results rang in.
“We knew going in that they were giving us way more money to make it than we would ever make back,” he admitted to W magazine, “I had a kid come up to me on the street, ten years old, and he says, ‘Are you that guy from Stay? What the fuck was that movie about?’ I think that’s great. I’m just as proud if someone says, ‘Hey, you made me sick in that movie’, as if they say I made them cry.”
This might seem like him trying to cope with one of his movies losing almost all of its money, but honestly, the entire point of acting is to evoke a response from an audience, and while ideally, you want it to be the intended response, some would argue that any emotion is better than none at all.
Stay definitely made audiences feel something, and there are even a few people who would rank it among the actor’s best ever movies and might be a little mad for doing so, but you’ll have to watch the film for yourself to decide.
