We chat to the very private Hollywood star Ryan Gosling

When actor Ryan Gosling isn’t the first actor to endorse a watch but his interest in the backstory led him to TAG Heuer.

Ryan Gosling wears the TAG Heuer Carrera

In the lead-up to meeting a celebrity, one thought tends to play on your mind: which character is going to show? In the case of Ryan Gosling, there are plenty of possibilities. Will it be the goofy, earnest, puppydog eyes of Noah from The Notebook I lock onto? Or the wisecracking, gym-buffed dating coach Jacob, from Crazy Stupid Love, ready to offer some style suggestions? There’s always the dark horse, too – the all-singing, all-dancing Sebastian from La La Land.

Full disclosure: my fingers were crossed for Jacob from Crazy Stupid Love. If it’s uncool for a fully-grown parent with their dating days long behind them to admit they’ve watched a rom com more than five times, then colour me uncool. Because that’s a conservative punt.

The one who sat across from me, unfortunately, was as far from my dream drinking buddy Jake as he could possibly be. The Gosling who showed for the interview was my last choice. Yes, the character known as simply “the driver” from the neo-noir film few people will ever see twice, Drive. The movie is considered by many, including screenrant.com, one of the world’s leading film news sites, to be his best work.

You can relax. It’s not the menacing or quick-to-violence part of his role that Ryan embodies in real life. It’s the even, slow, inscrutable gaze that has the effect of unsettling most other characters in the movie. Until, that is, you discover the slow smile that can dawn on those he warms to, such as Carey Mulligan. She would still have a tan from some of the smiles she received in Drive, they are that warm.

In Drive, Ryan plays a drifter mechanic cum stunt man cum getaway driver who makes the terrible mistake of getting into business with Bryan Cranston. He obviously hasn’t seen Breaking Bad, or Your Honour, or Sneaky Pete (basically, all of Bryan Cranston’s performances) because you never, ever get into business with Bryan Cranston. Gosling’s character does, and to sum it up, things go badly.

The effect is heightened by the location. We are in Los Angeles at night, the setting for much of the critically acclaimed film, sitting on an open-air balcony in a hacienda-style mansion. We have driven, in convoy, up into the hills and cliffs of Benedict Canyon. It’s an inky dark, still LA evening, with that bejewelled broader context of city lights that stretch to the horizon behind Gosling. The whole venue, including the expansive gardens and huge ornamental lake, are washed in the subtle red and blue hues of the TAG Heuer advertising campaign starring Gosling that is now plastering the world’s billboards. He is their high-profile new ambassador.

In 41-year-old Gosling, TAG Heuer has a dream trifecta; an authentic and un-commercial personality who manages to retain a genuine air of mystery, thanks to his absence from social media. A screen icon with an automotive bent to carry on the legacy of previous brand affiliate Steve McQueen. And perhaps the only heartthrob actor who appeals as much to men as he does to women.

Ryan Gosling

Any doubts that TAG Heuer is playing on the Drive connection are dispelled when two musicians take to the stage and begin performing the soundtrack to the movie. It’s an oozy, bleepy electronic vibe, like Daft Punk on tranquillisers at a strip club. Neon. Lipstick. It’s a big mood, that’s for sure. Whispers pass around the crowd – it’s the actual duo from the soundtrack. What a genius move by the event organisers. The sensation for guests that we are actually in a movie is now uncanny, and not just for me, as the interview begins.

“Hello,” he says to me, with a nod, and an expectant look on his face. There is a little small talk about Melbourne, about how far I have come to interview him – a fact, I am told later, that had the effect of making him nervous – and then we’re back to that silent, expectant gaze, with no rush to fill it. He is wearing the most extraordinarily bright mustard-coloured, felt-textured suit, with a fitted black T-shirt. The ensemble proves for all time that this man can make anything perfectly reasonable. Stylish, even.

My opening gambit is to ask Gosling about the watches he wears in his movies. Because the subject of today’s interview is indeed timepieces. And as a person whose entire life is filled with scrutinising who wears what, and where, I can tell you conclusively that Ryan Gosling makes spectacularly considered watch choices in his movies. “Oh yeah?” He responds, when I put it to him that he’s very good at selecting the right watch for the right character. “Like what?”

Like the chronograph – a watch with a stopwatch function – that he ties to the wheel in Drive whose ticking gives the five minutes he promises to wait incredible, audible dramatic tension. Like the solid gold dress watch from the 1930s he wears as a style cue in Crazy Stupid Love. The slim, unassuming but perfectly pitched vintage watch on a leather strap in La La Land. The man does not miss. And he actually does know it, because he chimes in to add one: “Don’t forget the calculator watch in Half Nelson…”

“Yes I do think a lot about it now,” he says, “but I have to give credit to the prop departments because it never really occurred to me to do that until I made my first film. And there’s a point where the prop department comes up to the actors and asks them if their character wears a watch, and if so, what kind? So it wasn’t really until then that I even really considered that a watch could communicate something about a person or about a character, but ever since then I’ve tried to find a way to use that as a tool.”

In First Man, in which Gosling played Neil Armstrong, he was required to visit NASA during his preparation. “I think I’ve always been a watch fan, but it wasn’t until I did First Man that I really started to appreciate them on a different level. When I would visit NASA, the phrase ‘built like a Swiss watch’ would come out often, in relation to its spacecraft. It just seemed to be the sort of gold standard of design and mechanical artistry. Ever since that experience I have a new-found respect for them.”

He may not take full credit for his watch choices in movies but he certainly can for his decision to partner with TAG Heuer – a brand whose history, not coincidentally, is steeped in automotive folklore. Jack Heuer, the last family member to be involved in the company, could be said to have done more not only for watches in motor racing but also for timekeeping in the sport. His innovations led to market-leading accuracy, and private contracts with Ferrari that ran far deeper than the sponsorship deals that saw Heuer emblazoned on its drivers’ fire suits in the 1970s.

TAG Heuer Carrera

Heuer was also a genius marketer, with finely tuned instincts. The Carrera line that Gosling wears in the campaign – a “timeless design you could happily wear in any era”, he says – was the brainchild of Heuer. It was a robust, accurate-for-the-time and classically handsome wristwatch. But what Heuer loved about it the most was the sound of the name. “Carrera, Carrera,” he once purred to me in an interview, savouring the word as if it were a disc of Swiss chocolate on his tongue. “What a perfect name for a wristwatch.”

Where Jack Heuer has left an indelible mark on the watch industry, CEO Frédéric Arnault is well and truly in the process of leaving his, after 18 months in the top job. He is the fourth son of the third-wealthiest man in the world and chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Bernard Arnault. Pulling Gosling is a major coup, and in his telling of the story to The New York Times the actor was promised that he would not just be an “influencer” for the brand, but also given joint creative control of their campaigns. It was a right he exercised by choosing the photographer, Pari Dukovic, for this first series of images.

That’s Arnault’s version of events that allegedly took 18 months before a deal was reached. I put the question to Gosling: given he could have the pick of the brands when it comes to an association, why TAG Heuer? “It was an easy decision, really,” he says. “I haven’t felt a connection with another brand up until now. And on a technical level, TAG Heuer has been innovating and leading in its field for more than 160 years.”

As for his first contact with the brand, it was an advertising campaign. He can’t pinpoint it exactly – there were sharks in a swimming pool, it was black and white. A little research reveals it was called “Success. It’s a Mind Game”. It is classic mid-’90s ad creative and it holds up surprisingly well, demonstrating in 60 seconds the elite nature of TAG Heuer wearers and their ability to perform under pressure.

There was no – sadly for me, because can you imagine how good the quote would have been? – Leonard DiCaprio staring pensively at the TAG Heuer in his hand. “No, not that one,” says Gosling Later in life, he noticed TAG Heuer in the movie Le Mans, on McQueen. “And I think it was in the Jason Bourne movies?” He says, referencing the TAG Heuer Link Chronograph Matt Damon wore in all three films.

The move to become an ambassador – which is an eyebrow-raising one for someone who has simply not done this kind of thing until now – has a deeper driver as well: “On a personal level, I just think about time more than I used to. I have two young kids, and they’re growing up fast, so I keep an eye on the clock in a way I didn’t used to. This collaboration just signifies that to me.”

TAG Heuer Carrera

Speaking of kids, when Gosling was one himself, in the ’80s, his first memories of watches were starkly imprinted, and honestly, when I hear them I can’t help but laugh. The interview is approaching its end, and we have a moment of levity at last. Because what he says is true; I’ve just never thought of it this way. “I noticed that adults were always checking their watches,” he says. “And it felt to me like it meant that you had things to do or people to see. It felt like it was emblematic of having a life or something, an interesting life. I don’t know. I wanted one. And I also think they were just prominent in things that I was watching. I was a big fan of the Warren Beatty Dick Tracy film, and obviously that watch plays a big part in that film. So I just remember being aware of them.”

In his early acting days, he was advised by a mentor to always wear a watch in auditions and to look at it every now and again like you’re conscious of the time: “He told me that in the beginning, when he was starting out and he was taking meetings and auditions, he always made sure to wear a watch. And he would always make a point to check it during the meeting or the audition so that the people he was meeting with would feel like he had another audition to get to, so that he didn’t appear desperate. And I thought that was such a funny idea.”

This observation is indeed funny, and it’s very true. Because Gosling has looked at his Carrera watch all through this interview, as I’ve been probing him on the subject. I have been reminded repeatedly that we are on the clock, we have to get this done. He continues to gaze at his watch, the seconds tick by. I try to tune into what he’s thinking.

The last question, prompted by the TAG Heuer publicist in the room, is this: “Why do we still wear watches? We have phones, the time is everywhere; why do we need a watch too?”

He looks up. Finally, I get that slow, dreamy smile he used to melt Carey Mulligan in Drive. The one that has launched a million crushes. It might just be exactly what Ryan Gosling was pondering in that moment, because the answer is perfectly prepared.

“Well, I think that there are so many things trying to distract you and take your time now,” he says. “I think if you use your phone for the time, it can often end up taking a lot of your time. A watch isn’t trying to take your time. It’s just giving it to you.”