How Ryan Gosling turned wearing a watch into an acting technique: “You see it all the time”
You can’t hate Ryan Gosling; it’s impossible. So not hateable is he, in fact, that there aren’t even any recorded instances of anyone trying to hate him. Not only is he wildly talented, as evidenced by the last 20 years of his career, which has seen him convincingly do action hero, romantic comedy lead, dancing in La La Land, sci-fi and whatever Barbie is, but he does it all with a smile. There is versatile, and there is likeable, and then there’s Ryan Gosling.
His journey from Mouseketeer to becoming one of the finest actors in Hollywood has taken some time, but now, he’s one of the few star names in the industry that you can pretty much bank on in terms of whatever project he’s signed up for being a very high-quality film indeed. George Clooney is another, albeit with the exception of Ticket to Paradise with Julia Roberts, obviously.
He is not as prolific as some actors, and is perhaps why he tends to go for quality over quantity when it comes to films. He will usually only take on one movie a year, to enable him to fairly share the responsibility of his two kids with his wife, fellow actor Eva Mendes.
Having already gone up to space in The First Man back in 2018, the 44-year-old Canadian will be clambering back on board a rocket to appear in Project Hail Mary, the much-awaited adaptation of The Martian author Andy Weir’s sci-fi comedy.
That ties in rather smartly for Gosling, given that astronauts are reliant on their timepieces—you only have to know a little about the Omega Speedmaster to back that up—and it seems the actor is something of a watch-obsessive. Recently, he told GQ that this obsession, no doubt helped by a lucrative partnership with Tag Heuer, has even begun to influence his on-set decisions about characters.
He said, “I’m always having to spend time thinking about watches, what they can communicate and how they can add nuance to a character. For instance, when I did Half Nelson, I wore a calculator watch that was held together by a rubber band because it communicated this was a teacher at the end of his rope. When I did Drive, I put the watch on the steering wheel because I wanted it to communicate how every second was life or death to this character.”
Gosling even decided to wear three gold watches on one arm in Barbie, simply because in a previous scene, his character is asked for the time and he doesn’t have it. That kind of involvement in a character has been a hallmark of his for some years now. While not a method actor as such, he puts a huge amount of preparation into any role he takes on, sometimes changing physically, such as in Blade Runner 2049. He mostly goes the extra mile, like learning piano from scratch for La La Land or moving to live in South Carolina for The Notebook.
And his love of watches now colours the way he takes in classics of yesteryear, too, with Gosling adding, “You realise just how heavily watches and timepieces feature into film history. Like, The Greatest Game, Casablanca, Sunset Boulevard. You know, in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, watches are a key plot element that are involved in the heist planning. It’s all down to the minute, and the characters all wear watches that represent their personal stakes in the heist.”
Make sure you keep an eye on Gosling’s wrist from now on.
