The 2007 performance Ryan Gosling will always regret: “I don’t feel like I did a very good job”
Up until very recently, you could make the case that while Ryan Gosling is undoubtedly one of his generation’s finest actors, broad genre films were always the worst use of his talents.
Put him in a drama, romance, or even a comedy, and he’ll more than likely soar. However, parachute him into either a big-budget blockbuster of a high-concept thriller, and the results usually ranged from the mediocre to the dire, until two movies did a stellar job of changing that perception.
Gangster Squad was rubbish, Blade Runner 2049 was a worthy enough sequel to one of the greatest sci-fi flicks ever made, but bombed colossally at the box office, Netflix claimed that a lot of people watched The Gray Man, although any of them would be hard-pressed to remember anything about it ten minutes after the credits rolled, and The Fall Guy was a run-of-the-mill action comedy that underperformed.
His record of headlining studio-backed crowd-pleasers wasn’t great, to put it lightly, but his Academy Award-nominated supporting role in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie finally gave Gosling the massive commercial smash hit that had eluded him thus far, with Project Hail Mary adding another feather to his cap.
The jury is still out on Star Wars: The Last Starfighter, since the franchise is running on fumes and Shawn Levy isn’t the most inspiring filmmaker on the planet, but at least Gosling has gone some way to distancing himself from the ‘box office poison’ tag. The first high-concept gig of his career was actually pretty good, and it turned a profit, with the only thing letting it down being the actor himself.
At least, that’s the way he remembers it. In his first big-screen outing after landing his first Oscar nod for Half Nelson, Gosling sparred with the legendary Anthony Hopkins in Fracture, an increasingly ludicrous potboiler that sees the former’s lawyer try to outwit the latter’s engineer, who shoots his adulterous wife before attempting to manoeuvre himself out of facing the consequences at trial.
It’s a glorified B-movie, but an enjoyable one nonetheless, even if Gosling wasn’t happy with his performance, and he had one reason why. “I don’t feel like I did a very good job, because I was so busy watching Anthony,” he explained. “I’d have to remind myself, ‘You have a character to play. Stop watching him.'”
Instead of focusing on his own work, he became preoccupied with “trying to take apart how Anthony does it, trying to dismantle his talent and understand it.” That’s ironic in itself, since whenever Hopkins is asked what made him one of the United Kingdom’s finest-ever actors, he shrugs his shoulders and says he reads the script, memorises the lines, and then says them on set.
Gosling was attempting to figure out the minutiae of what made Hopkins tick, and by doing so, he cut his own performance off at the knees. He’s not bad in Fracture, but by his own admission, he could have been much better if he wasn’t so obsessed with what his co-star was doing and how they were doing it.
