Morgan Corby

Ooh, that hair…that permanent half smile…that grey eyed gaze that sees deep into your very soul… “What a man! What a talent!” the world cries out, weeping with adoration as our favourite Canadian whistles wistfully on an LA pier in ‘La La Land’ or leaps about saving humanity in ‘Blade Runner 2049’. “Fill his finely sculpted arms with Oscars and grant him eternal youth in the halls of Hollywood fame!”

Ryan Gosling seems to be on a one-man mission to fill our screens at all times. He, like Benedict Cumberbatch in the early 2010’s and Eddie Redmayne a few years later, is on an apparently unstoppable rise to cinematic domination. A starring role in 2015’s ‘The Big Short’ (a best picture nominee) followed by hugely successful buddy cop comedy ‘The Nice Guys’ alongside Russell Crowe a year later, and then of course the mega-hit of ‘La La Land’ which could do no wrong other than royally confuse Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway (BBC). Now with the world still coming to terms with Ryan’s piano playing he is being served up to us as the figurehead for the reanimation of a cinematic behemoth – Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’. And hey, guess what. It’s bloody brilliant.

So how did this happen?

Well perhaps the best way to explain this is to point out a crucial difference in the story of Ryan’s rise to the birth of Benedict and the emergence of Eddie. Both of the British stars, whilst not complete unknowns, were thrust into fame brutally fast. Mr Cumberbatch spent ten years knocking about on tv and playing, in his own words, “big parts in small films, and small parts in big films.” And then ‘Sherlock’ happened. Yes, happened; he was not ‘cast in’ Sherlock, nor did Sherlock ‘begin’, Sherlock was an event, a moment of before and after. Within the year he was selected for Peter Jackson’s ‘Hobbit’ as Smaug and the lead roles have just kept on rolling in. Alan Turing in ‘The Imitation Game’, a conflicted slaver in McQueen’s ’12 Years a Slave’, the mesmeric intergalactic baddie in J.J. Abram’s ‘Star Trek: Into Darkness’, even a major role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (although this time with a flawless American accent as ‘Dr Strange’ is, of course, a good guy). It is no coincidence that Benedict’s filmography has a definite divide between those you’ve seen and those you’ve never heard of – and that divide dates precisely from the airing of the first series of Sherlock. Eddie Redmayne’s path was a little less steep than Benedict’s, but not by much. Again, a decade or so of minor roles in minor films preceded his breakthrough in 2011 with ‘My Week with Marylin’ and ‘Les Miserables’ a year later. Then came the Oscar (thoroughly deserved) for ‘The Theory of Everything’ and hey! A star is born! And now we all sit comfortably on our sofas enjoying the latest Redmayne flick, be that ‘The Danish Girl’, ‘Fantastic Beast’s and Where to Find Them’, or the upcoming ‘Early Man’, with an open box of milk tray on our lap and our fingers poised on the pause button ready for the next close up of those chiselled cheekbones.

But our Ryan took a different path, a much longer one.

As is fairly well known he was a child star alongside the likes of Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears (an appearance on The Graham Norton Show unearthed a rather wonderful video of him as a child dancing as part of a youth competition – the trousers alone make it worth a watch https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U6GgvDRmxz0) and from there he moved into indie film scene. There he worked for a few years until Hollywood showed up with ‘The Notebook’ and then it seemed he could play anyone in anything. Romantic Comedies – ‘Crazy Stupid Love’, indie weirdies – ‘Drive’ and ‘Lars and the Real Girl’, and an Oscar nod for ‘Half Nelson’ all followed and there he was, an established actor. Despite a few ill-advised career moves (‘Only God Forgives’ and his own directorial debut, ‘Lost River’, were critical and financial failures) he kept working his way up film after film until 2015/16’s mega-hits embedded him in our consciousness so firmly. So how did he do it? I’ll tell you. By being whatever we want him to be.

Lead actors play off an image; cutesy English Eddie, the more aristocratic and aloof Benedict, appealing to British and American audiences alike in their humanity and sensitivity. But American megastars can’t do that, can they? The Hollywood superstar has always been an unobtainable and distant idol. Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp, they all look down at us from the screen with an expression on their face that says (to borrow a phrase from Dylan Moran) ‘I don’t even know you’re there, and if I did I would ignore you.’ Olympian figures of eternal beauty and perfection. Clooney has done some work to reverse this trend but come on, his version of cuddly middle age in ‘The Descendants’ would make most models weep, let alone us mere mortals watching with a beer can balanced on our ninth belly. Yet Ryan has managed to cross this divide. By becoming a familiar face to all kinds film goers over the years he has become a set of familiar and capable hands who inspires good will from all. He is one of us. A pretty decent one of us, let’s not pretend otherwise, but still recognisably human. His charisma derives from his talent and from his ability to give out the appearance of genuine interest, not from the God like strutting of the idols we’re are used to. From smiling alongside Emma Stone in a relatable ‘boy next door’ kinda way to impenetrable man of mystery in Nicolas Winding Refn’s neon tinted slow burners, he is everything we dream of. A mortal fulfilling our dreams of big screen glory, all the time wearing a wry look that reminds us he’s just that bloke we saw on that chat show the other day. And wasn’t he lovely.

This humanity was what made him perfect for La La Land, the film that finally lifted him from versatile actor to A lister. The two leads, Stone and Gosling, had an air of human frailty. Whilst in years gone by it would be Gene Kelly dazzling us with his extraordinary dancing or Julie Andrews belting out perfect note after perfect note, now we get two characters who have been bought down to earth. Yes, Ryan’s dancing is a tad shaky and yes Emma is a teensy bit shrill on high notes but we care so much about these people that these human moments simply endear them to us all the more. In Ryan Gosling Hollywood has given us a hero who is one of us. He is the man we all love to love, a new age Tom Hanks with a better body and puppy dog eyes, not another note perfect final product saving the world without getting a hair out of place in the latest billion dollar flick. Hang on…that’s what Ryan’s doing in the new Blade Runner… Well, it’s still bloody brilliant so I’m just going to take that as final proof of Ryan’s refusal to be elevated above us. He can be as much of an A lister as he likes, but he’ll always look like he slipped into the Hollywood party through the fire door carrying a plate of nibbles, only pausing on his way to the top table to offer Morgan Freeman a refill.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/jul/26/benedict-cumberbatch-inside-story-hamlet-sherlock-school-actor – Benedict Cumberbatch interview

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U6GgvDRmxz0 – Ryan Gosling dance

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-39097183 – La La Land Oscars news page