From leading man to toy boy, Gosling’s a go for Barbie’s Ken

After a four-year absence, actor Ryan Gosling returns to the big screen.

Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie in Barbie. Picture: Supplied

According to Margot Robbie, actor Ryan Gosling is “an overthinker”.

Gosling, she says, will say something, “and then 40 minutes later he’ll come up to me and be like, ‘You know when I said that? I’m just clarifying that what I meant was, blah blah’. And I’m like, ‘Why are you still thinking about that?’”

The pair will star alongside each other in Barbie, a live-action adventure directed by the Oscar-nominated Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird) which she wrote with her husband, director Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story). Gosling will play the adoring platinum Ken to Robbie’s cotton-candy-pink Barbie. Barbie is Gosling’s third film since taking a four-year absence from Hollywood. It was a break, he says in the latest edition of GQ, that he took in order to “spend as much time as I could” with his two young daughters, whom he shares with The Place Beyond the Pines co-star Eva Mendes.

Since returning to the big screen last year, Gosling has starred in two blockbuster action films: Netflix’s assassin flick The Gray Man, and the upcoming film The Fall Guy.

The latter was filmed in Australia and involved the brief closure of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. His next role, as the misunderstood Mattel hunk, couldn’t be more different.

“We were like, ‘He’s just done a movie called First Man … and then he’s done a movie called The Gray Man … maybe he’s ready to do Barbie! Maybe he wants to do the total opposite,” joked Robbie.

Gosling tells GQ that he felt compelled to take on the role of Ken partly because he wanted to work on a woman-led project that puts female characters forward, and partly because he witnessed his daughter’s Ken doll “facedown in the mud outside one day, next to a squished lemon”.

“It was like, this guy’s story does need to be told, you know?” he said.

In Gosling’s GQ Australia cover story, available exclusively in The Australian on Friday, the actor discusses his hiatus from Hollywood, his transition from brooding indie star to blockbuster leading man, and his role as history’s most misunderstood doll.