Whereas Margot Robbie’s Vogue shoot leaned into the Barbie idea pretty hard, Ryan Gosling’s GQ pictures don’t really cleave to our notion of Ken. Except… do they, in a way? Yes, this is grittier than our boy ever got to be, but there is still something distinctly manicured about Ryan’s roughness here. The dirt, or shadows, or bronzer, or… chest hair?… displayed just-so, the winky pink coat, the hair overstyled to look unstyled, and frosted as if he woke up in 2002 and tried to join a boy band for rumpled men. He’s like Cowboy Ken crossed with, somehow, celebrity hairstylist Ken Paves, who, being a Ken, therefore makes this all still A Very Ken Endeavor. I contradicted my own headline.
The piece is a hoot. The writer, both himself and through sources like Emily Blunt and Margot Robbie, notes how little Gosling likes to talk abut himself and how much he overthinks what he says — and gets ample supporting evidence, from the number of times he frets that he’s accidentally self-mythologizing in a pretentious way (he isn’t), or when he calls to expand on a number of things he’s worried he said in a way that didn’t do them justice (chiefly, that when he said he didn’t want kids until he met Eva, he meant to say that meeting her made him realize he ONLY wanted kids with Eva — a similar thought, but with an extra later of romance?). There’s also a lot about his childhood in Ontario, and of course, musings about Ken. Ryan Gosling can be very funny, and here he’s talking about the online folks who were so FURIOUS that they cast someone 42 to play Ken:
“It is funny,” he says, “this kind of clutching-your-pearls idea of, like, #notmyken. Like you ever thought about Ken before this?” As he said earlier, this is a guy whose job is beach. “And everyone was fine with that, for him to have a job that is nothing. But suddenly, it’s like, ‘No, we’ve cared about Ken this whole time.’ No, you didn’t. You never did. You never cared. Barbie never fucked with Ken. That’s the point. If you ever really cared about Ken, you would know that nobody cared about Ken. So your hypocrisy is exposed. This is why his story must be told.”
Gosling catches himself and laughs. “I care about this dude now. I’m like his representative. ‘Ken couldn’t show up to receive this award, so I’m here to accept it for him.’ ”
And:
And as for Ken, the no-thoughts-just-vibes character he plays in the film: “There’s something about this Ken that really, I think, relates to that [childhood] version of myself. Just, like, the guy that was putting on Hammer pants and dancing at the mall and smelling like Drakkar Noir and Aqua Net-ing bangs. I owe that kid a lot. I feel like I was very quick to distance myself from him when I started making more serious films. But the reality is that, like, he’s the reason I have everything I have.”
Gosling says he’s been thinking about that kid a lot recently: “He didn’t know what he was doing or why he was doing it, he was just doing it, and it’s like, I owe my whole life to him. And I wish I had been more grateful at the time, you know?” He says he spent a lot of time on the Barbie set communing with this younger version of himself, who didn’t have a clue, but who did everything in total earnestness. “I really had to go back and touch base with that little dude,” Gosling says, “and say thank you, and ask for his help.”
Aw. Trust me, that’s just a small portion of the piece, which lives here if you want to see more pictures of Cowboy Ken Paves working the land. Which, I think we all do.
