The one gesture Ryan Gosling wishes he could do over: “There’s a moment that haunts me”
Imagine spending months preparing for a role, not only learning your lines but an entirely new skills to embody a character, training and studying to the point where you’ve hit the set and killed it during a frantic six-week shoot schedule, wowing everyone and then some, only to fumble it at the last hurdle.
Well, it’s an experience Ryan Gosling can attest to.
For someone as powerful as Gosling in the world of movie-making, it’s tough to imagine any sort of anxiety lingering within a man who looks like he was made in a leading man factory where stars are assembled on a conveyor belt with classic Hollywood good looks. But then, as he moved into his career, taking on roles in movies like Drive, Lars and the Real Girl, The Place Beyond the Pines and more, he proved that he’s way more than your typical romantic lead.
He proved that he can do it all, spanning genres from the silliness of his role as Ken in Barbie to his devastatingly devoted Noah Calhoun in The Notebook, to the intensity of an action movie like Only God Forgives, and when he made La La Land in 2016, he added singing and dancing to that knockout resume.
In preparation for his role as jazz connoisseur Sebastian Wilder, Gosling spent months studying the greats of the genre and even learnt to play jazz piano, and on top of learning the lines, songs and choreography, it was no small feat. While shooting the movie was a lightning operation over and done with in a swift six weeks, the time the actor put in goes way beyond that, beginning four months before they even hit the set.
So his dedication to the role is not in question, which makes it all the more devastating that out of all of his projects, this is the one that keeps him up at night.
It doesn’t come down to a missed line, or a weak scene, or a bum note, but instead to the poster and to something as simple as a not-pointed finger.
“There’s a moment that haunts me where we’re dancing, Emma and I, and I didn’t know this would become the poster for the movie, but I thought we were supposed to have our hands up and I thought it’d be cool to put my hand like that,” he said to the Wall Street Journal, sighing heavily as he demonstrated the weak, limp hand the final take captured.
But as he said, he had no idea that the scene would be cut into a still and used on the global poster for the movie, becoming the ultimate image associated with the revered film. So suddenly, Gosling’s unpolished, weird little hand was everywhere, like a dance teacher’s worst nightmare, and this one lazy detail taunts the perfectionism he applied to the rest of the movie.
“Even though everyone told me it wasn’t cool, I was sure that that was cooler than that,” he said, demonstrating his own limp hand versus a strict, straight, classic dancer hand with pointed fingers. That’s the type of sharp hand Emma Stone has on the poster, but not Gosling, “And now when I look at it, and I have to see it all the time,” he said, barely even able to laugh at the mistake which will not leave his mind.
“It just killed the energy that way. It was sort of like, all leading to what? Just like a lazy, I call it La La Hand,” he said, forever to be haunted by a lazy mistake that’s now immortalised on posters forever.
