[COLUMN] Whatever Happened to Ryan Gosling? | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

This weekend, it was announced that Ryan Gosling would be headlining an upcoming reboot of Ghost Rider for Marvel Studios. It was one of the big two announcements from the studio coming out of San Diego Comic-Con, along with the news that Ryan Coogler would be shooting Black Panter III on film for IMAX. “Infinity Vision” just didn’t seem to cut it.

A decade ago, or even just five years ago, this would have been incredible and earth-shattering news. Gosling is a three-time Oscar nominee, for his work on Half Nelson, La La Land and Barbie. He is a box office draw, acting as the second lead in Greta Gerwig’s smash hit Barbie and being the only human face on screen for the majority of this year’s Project Hail Mary. On paper, this sort of reveal should have generated a wave of excitement comparable to Mahershala Ali starring in Blade.

However, the reaction seems to be somewhat muted. The earth did not tilt on its axis. It’s interesting to wonder why that is. Part of it is undoubtedly just the diminished cultural cachet of the superhero genre in general and of Marvel Studios in particular. The studio failed to get a single of the three movies it released last year into the end-of-year box office top ten. Its upcoming Avengers: Doomsday has lost its premium format screens to Dune: Part Three.

More to the point, Ghost Rider isn’t exactly a gold-standard brand. Mahershala Ali was a two-time Oscar winner, but he also had the luxury of attaching himself to a franchise that helped launch the modern superhero boom. Blade might not be a huge franchise within the world of comic books, but the name means something in the world of comic book movies. In contrast, Ghost Rider had two poorly-received movies starring Nicolas Cage and a guest stint on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

So, in that sense, Ghost Rider is trying to ice-skate uphill. It doesn’t help matters that Gosling’s casting was announced alongside director Shawn Levy. Levy’s announcement was great news for investors. Levy had previously directed Deadpool & Wolverine for the studio. He was also responsible for the Night at the Museum franchise and for Free Guy. Levy is the very definition of a safe pair of hands. He has also just finished shooting Star Wars: Starfighter with Gosling.

From a studio perspective, Levy makes sense. Deadpool & Wolverine grossed $1.3bn worldwide, and is maybe the single greatest commercial success that Marvel Studios has enjoyed since Avengers: Endgame. More to the point, given the studio’s public humiliation at failing to actually get Mahershala Ali’s Blade made, there is something to be said for hiring a filmmaker who absolutely, positively, unquestionably will get a film actually made. The studio can’t take that for granted.

It is worth acknowledging that Levy can be solid. He has a better track record as a producer than a director, producing Arrival, Rosaline, Backrooms and Love and Monsters. However, Levy is not producing Ghost Rider, he is directing it. And while Levy directed the far-better-than-it-had-any-right-to-be Real Steel, it’s hard to measure the one solid crowd-pleaser in his filmography against the deep mediocrity of films like Deadpool & Wolverine, This is Where I Leave You, Date Night, and so on.

As such, from an audience’s perspective, Levy is also part of the problem. It’s just very hard to get excited by the promise of a director whose most reliable attribute is his ability to actually finish a movie and his seeming inability to say “no” to a studio note. There is a reason that very few trailers open with the promise of “from the journeyman mind of Shawn Levy” or “with the workmanlike competence of Shawn Levy” to entice viewers to cinemas.

However, all of this get at the more fundamental underlying issue here. There is something very appealing about the idea of a Ryan Gosling Ghost Rider movie, but something depressingly predictable about Ryan Gosling starring in a Ghost Rider movie from Shawn Levy. It feels like the worst possible version of the project that could potentially exist, but also – depressingly – the most predictable.

After all, Gosling is a actor who has longstanding relationships with auteurs like Nicholas Winding Refn, Derek Cianfrance and Damien Chazelle. Even setting aside those relationships across multiple films, he has also made films with directors like Greta Gerwig, Denis Villeneuve, Shane Black and Terrence Malick. He is an actor whose early career was defined by his taste and his willingness to trust ambitious filmmakers who worked outside the studio system.

Gosling began as a child actor, playing a Mouseketeer on The All New Mickey Mouse Club, and it does feel like a lot his early career choices were a reaction against that – pushing against the notion that he was “a Disney Kid” by taking bold and provocative roles in films like Blue Valentine and Drive.  Truth be told, a lot of Gosling’s early work feel a little “try hard”, as if the actor was pushing too hard against his good looks and charm.

There were points in Gosling’s career where he could feel almost like a parody of an actor who was desperate to be taken seriously, whether playing a small-town guy engaged to a sex doll in Lars and the Real Girl or producing his first (and to date only) directorial effort Lost River as a very clumsy David Lynch homage. He was very famously fired from Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones after showing up on set bald and overweight because he felt that was what the character should be.

It could seem, particularly in the early 2010s, like Gosling was wound just a little too tight, even if it did result in mesmerizing performances like his work in Drive and even underrated work like his turn in Only God Forgives. However, towards the end of the 2010s, Gosling seemed to loosen up. He seemed to find his groove, striking a nice balance between charm and intensity. Gosling discovered that he could be funny on screen in relatively serious movies, winning over the audience.

Gosling is one of the best parts of Adam McKay’s The Big Short, playing a sleezy bank executive. He did incredible work with Russell Crowe in Shane Black’s The Nice Guys, a film that – in a fairer universe – would have turned into a quietly reliable franchise for all three to dip in and out of. He was stunning in Damien Chazelle’s La La Land opposite frequent co-star Emma Stone, who he had worked with on Crazy Stupid Love and Gangster Squad.

By this point, Gosling was still capable of playing characters with real depth of emotion and feeling. He anchored Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 as the replicant K, a character desperately longing to be the hero of a narrative that never belonged to him. His stoic and reserved performance as Neil Armstrong in First Man got lost in the nonsense culture war about whether the movie contained the scientifically-determined correct number of American flags.

However, at this point in his career, Gosling pivoted hard. He began to choose goofier projects and sillier roles. He remains a really compelling performer. His work as Ken in Gerwig’s Barbie is one of the best supporting performances of the decade precisely because it’s Gosling pushing against his particular strengths to render a character who has convinced himself that he is completely devoid of the sort of interior life that defines so many of Gosling’s most engaging characters.

Sadly, Ken feels like the exception here. Following Blade Runner 2049 and First Man, Gosling immediately locked in on “lovable goof” as his new star persona. He worked with the Russo Brothers on The Gray Man, which has yet to produce the long-promised expanded universe. He played a goofy stunt guy in David Leitch’s The Fall Guy. And he also headlined Project Hail Mary, a “sad astronaut” movie with none of the depth and pathos that defined Gosling’s work in First Man.

Gosling has talked quite candidly about this transition within his filmography. "A long time ago, I went to see a shrink," Gosling admitted in an interview with The Standard in 2016. "He wrote me a prescription that said: ‘Do comedy.’” He has also argued that this shift in his career is part of an effort to ensure a healthier work-life balance, with his family – including his wife and earlier Ghost Rider love interest Eva Mendes and their kids.

“I don’t really take roles that are going to put me in some kind of dark place,” Gosling explained of the shift in his career to The Wall Street Journal. “This moment is what I feel like trying to read the room at home and feel like what is going to be best for all of us. The decisions I make, I make them with Eva and we make them with our family in mind first.” Gosling’s children were on set while they were filming Project Hail Mary.

It is hard to begrudge Gosling this shift in his career. It is nice that he has a stable career making movies that he enjoys and that his family are happy. However, it’s also worth acknowledging that these choices have made him a much less interesting actor than he would otherwise be, and than contemporaries like Jake Gyllenhaal, Leonardo DiCaprio or Cillian Murphy. And this is a large part of why it’s hard to get particularly excited about Gosling starring in Ghost Rider.

A version of Ghost Rider starring the actor who just came off La La Land, First Man, Blade Runner 2049 and Song to Song who was bringing a previous collaborator like Damien Chazelle or Denis Villeneuve along with him would be far more compelling than the version of Ghost Rider coming off the back of The Gray Man, Barbie, The Fall Guy, Project Hail Mary and the next Star Wars movie, reteaming with the director of the Night at the Museum and The Adam Project.

It is a vibe shift – and not necessarily a good one.