Nick Johnstone is the author of biographies of Johnny Depp, Sean Penn and George Clooney. As a journalist, Nick has interviewed many film personalities, including Roman Polanski, Darren Aronofsky, Jim Jarmusch, Helen Hunt, Werner Herzog and Ethan Hawke.

The Biography Ryan Gosling

Hollywood’s Finest

By Nick Johnstone

John Blake Publishing Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Nick Johnstone
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78219-460-6

Contents

Title Page,
INTRODUCTION: HOLLYWOOD’S FINEST,
1. A LITTLE PLACE CALLED LONDON,
2. EARLY INFLUENCES,
3. ‘MOUSE BOY’,
4. FIRST BREAKS AND BRANDO,
5. FIRST STEPS IN FILM,
6. STARTING OVER,
7. BREAKOUT,
8. RESEARCH AND CHARACTER BUILDING,
9. MURDER BY NUMBERS,
10. THE OUTSIDER,
11. A FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH,
12. MOVING ON,
13. RED CARPETS AND REALITY,
14. OFF-SCREEN ROMANCE,
15. HALF NELSON,
16. PASTURES NEW,
17. FRACTURE,
18. BIANCA,
19. ACCOLADES & AFRICA,
20. AWARDS, ICE CREAM & ENDINGS,
21. MOSTLY GOOD THINGS,
22. DEAD MAN’S BONES,
23. BLUE VALENTINE,
24. ON TOUR,
25. MEETINGS & OPPORTUNITIES,
26. CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE,
27. OBSTACLES & MILESTONES,
28. ARE THEY, AREN’T THEY?,
29. SPECULATION & HEROICS,
30. THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES,
31. WINNING STREAK,
32. RISKS & ROMANCE,
33. STAR IN THE ASCENT,
EPILOGUE,
FILMOGRAPHY,
Plates,
Copyright,

CHAPTER 1

A LITTLE PLACE CALLED LONDON

There’s another lesser-known city in the world called London and it can be found in Ontario, Canada. Named after its sprawling British twin, London, England, it is located 195km west of the major Canadian city, Toronto. According to the most recent census information at the time of writing, London, Ontario has a population of just under 367,000.

It was in this London, on Wednesday, 12 November 1980, that Ryan Thomas Gosling was born to Thomas and Donna Gosling. That same day, the news was abuzz with fantastical tales of space travel, as the American space probe Voyager 1 managed to send back pictures of its adventures orbiting Saturn.

Back on Planet Earth, Ryan was given his middle name after his father. He was not the couple’s first child. Four years earlier, in 1976, Donna had given birth to a daughter, whom they named Mandi.

Ryan was born at St Joseph’s Hospital, which can be found in London at 268 Grosvenor Street. It’s known for being one of the oldest hospitals in the whole of Canada, having first opened in 1869.

The week Ryan was born, the most popular films of 1980 up to that point were The Empire Strikes Back, Airplane!, Private Benjamin, Coal Miner’s Daughter, Smokey And The Bandit II, The Blue Lagoon, The Blues Brothers, Ordinary People, Urban Cowboy and The Shining, which gives you a sense of the cinematic climate he emerged into.

Born under the astrological sign of Scorpio, Ryan shares his birthday with melancholy-voiced Canadian singer/songwriter Neil Young; as well as the chilling, incarcerated American cult leader Charles Manson, Romanian Olympic gymnast Nadia Comaneci, French sculptor Auguste Rodin, American actress and Princess of Monaco Grace Kelly, the French filmmaker Jacques Tourneur, who created works such as Cat People and Days Of Glory, and actress Anne Hathaway, star of such movies as The Devil Wears Prada, Rachel Getting Married and One Day.

At the time Ryan was born, his father – a descendant of French-Canadian lineage – would have been in his mid-twenties. Most reports state that Thomas Gosling worked as a travelling salesman for a paper mill when Ryan was a child. However, it’s not clear if he was already doing this job when his son was born.

Ryan’s mother, Donna, was a secretary during his early years. Much later, according to Radar online, she would focus on her own study, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English from McMaster University in 2011 and then a Bachelor of Education from Brock University in 2012.

Back in November 1980, when the Goslings were tending to Ryan as a baby, London was still a relatively small city, with a population somewhere in the region of 250,000 people. Having been formally labelled the district of London in 1800, the area was declared a village in 1826. By 1855, commercial growth had seen the population swell to over 10,000 and, in response to that growth, there had been a round of legislative changes, which led to London becoming formally incorporated as a city.

That endorsement served as a catalyst for widespread growth, which kept the city expanding commercially and in terms of people moving there and setting up home, growing at a steady momentum, all the way until Ryan was born on that Wednesday in November 1980.

London wasn’t to be his home for long though, and, when he was two years old, the family packed up and moved themselves to a new base in Cornwall, an even smaller city in Eastern Ontario. The move meant their new home was around 400 miles drive away from the home where Ryan had spent his baby years.

The relocation, and, with it, the universal sense of upheaval, came about because Ryan’s father took a job working for a major paper mill in Cornwall called the Domtar Paper Mill. As mentioned earlier, it is unclear whether this was the job that saw Thomas Gosling become a travelling salesman for a paper mill or whether he had been doing the same job but for a different paper mill back in London. Regardless of which scenario it was, he would now settle into his role at Domtar Paper Mill and work for the firm for many years to come.

Cornwall sits on the banks of the St Lawrence River and its location connects it with the far larger cities of Ottawa, some 65 miles to the Northwest, and Montreal, around 71 miles to the Northeast. A recent census reveals in its data that approximately 70 per cent of those who live in the city speak English as their first language and that 24 per cent speak French as their first language – a dominating combination which gives Cornwall its distinct French- and English-speaking bilingual identity.

Due to its location making it a good defensive position, Cornwall was first established as a settlement back in 1784 by United Empire Loyalists who had migrated there from New York. With the support of the British government, they renamed what had earlier been called Pointe Maligne by French colonists New Johnstown. Then, in 1797, once it was firmly a part of the British colony of Upper Canada, New Johnstown was renamed for a third time as Cornwall, in honour of the Duke of Cornwall and the scenic, rugged coastal county of Cornwall, which lies in the southwest corner of England.

After that name change, Cornwall quickly grew to become a centre of industrial development and growth, as both paper and cotton mills were founded. As elsewhere across Canada, the opening of these new mills caused a population spike, as migrants heard about opportunities and flocked to the town in search of work. The influx meant that, by the end of the 19th century, the population had grown to the extent that it had surpassed 5,000 and many of the new inhabitants were French-Canadians.

Into the ongoing industrial boom, the Toronto Paper Company opened a mill in 1883, later renamed the Domtar Paper Mill in 1965. Some 20 years after Domtar took over, Thomas Gosling relocated his family to Cornwall, to take that job working for the mill.

In an interview with Jam! Showbiz, Ryan said that going into acting as a career meant that he was the first of 12 males in his family to break with tradition in not working for a paper mill. It’s not clear whether all of those relatives worked at the Domtar Paper Mill too, or if they all just so happened to be in the same industry, working for different paper mills. Nor is it clear if they were all on his father’s side of the family tree or if they were also from his mother’s family. In any case, the fact that the sons all followed in the footsteps of their fathers and took work at a paper mill gives us a picture of what kind of family Ryan was born into: one of tradition. In any case, Ryan would break the generational pattern by opting for a different path in life.

Growing up, Ryan was incredibly close to his sister Mandi and often refers to how much he looked up to her when he was a child and how he continues to do so as an adult. As is almost always the case, as the younger sibling, Ryan would have instinctively followed in his sister’s footsteps, wanting to do whatever she did.

When he turned four, it was time for Ryan to start kindergarten. Had he been born in the first half of 1980, he might have begun school at the age of five, but having turned four before the end of 1984 – the admissions cut-off for elementary school – he was deemed old enough by the system to be enrolled early. This means he started kindergarten in September 1985, when he was four years and ten months old.

It’s difficult to pin down the elementary school attended by Ryan due to the varied accounts of the path of his education. Some reports say that he began his elementary school education at East Front Public School in Cornwall, Ontario. The school still exists today and can be found at 1810 Montreal Road in Cornwall. However, there are other reports that do not mention Ryan attending East Front Public School and instead say that he started his education at Gladstone Public School, which can also be found in Cornwall, at 825 McConnell Avenue. Due to this dual reporting, it’s possible that he went to both schools in quick succession, starting at one and then switching to the other, for reasons we can only imagine.

Back home, Ryan was introduced to his lifelong love of music by his mother, a big fan of the Beatles, who often played music by the Fab Four on the family’s hi-fi system. Ryan would later tell The Huffington Post about how many memories he had of the Beatles sound-tracking his childhood, how hearing certain songs transported him straight back to the past. When asked to reveal his favourite Beatles song, he told the reporter it was ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, a track that features on their 1966 album Revolver. Of all the songs in their catalogue to choose, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ is an interesting choice as it is sometimes ranked by Paul McCartney as one of his own personal favourite Beatles songs.

McCartney apparently wrote the song by the swimming pool at John Lennon’s house in Weybridge, Surrey. He had arrived one day to find that his bandmate was not yet awake and, while waiting for him, he sat strumming away on his guitar until he suddenly found himself struck by a thunderclap of spontaneous inspiration. By the time Lennon had woken, McCartney had half written the song and debuted it for him. Liking the direction it was taking, they finished it, as was their magic, on the spot.

Though the Beatles were an important force in the Gosling household, nothing held as much sway as their Mormon faith. According to GQ magazine, Ryan’s parents were converted to the religion by door-to-door Mormon missionaries, who turned up on the doorstep proselytising and found what they had to say went down well.

There is no more detail in the public domain that goes into more depth as to how or why this happened. Were either or both of the Goslings religious in any form before the doorbell rang? Had they been raised within a particular faith, which they then abandoned, in order to follow The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Regardless of the answers to these questions and, more than that, how their conversion happened – instantly or over a period of visits – the Goslings (and particularly Donna) reportedly took to the Mormon faith with zeal and commitment. As a result, Ryan and Mandi were raised within the Mormon Church.

In interviews, Ryan has often said that his parents were not particularly strict Mormons and that, while the family did take the faith seriously, Donna was always careful to stress that it was just one faith and, if he and Mandi felt differently to their parents, then that was absolutely fine. In short, although this has sometimes been wrongly inferred, Ryan was most definitely not raised in a strict religious home.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded by Joseph Smith in Fayette, New York State in April 1830, following a vision that came to him in 1820, when God and Jesus both apparently appeared as the 14-year-old Smith prayed to God for guidance as to which church he should become a member of. The same year as the Mormon Church was founded, Smith also orchestrated the publication of 5,000 copies of The Book of Mormon in Palmyra, New York.

In terms of what Mormons believe, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints website summarises their belief system as follows: ‘We are all spiritual children of a loving Heavenly Father who sent us to this earth to learn and grow in a mortal state. As Mormons, we are followers of Jesus Christ. We live our lives to serve Him and teach of His eternal plan for each of us.’

Mormons use The Book of Mormon as well as the Bible for worship. They believe that the site of the Garden of Eden, where God placed Adam and Eve, is located in Jackson County, Missouri.

Their beliefs play a number of roles in their everyday lives, not least that it is a central premise of the faith that sees today’s estimated 13 million Mormons living a high level of attachment to family and so-called traditional family values. In terms of lifestyle choices, Mormons must obey a lengthy list of acts and substances that are forbidden, including the drinking of both tea and coffee, the smoking of tobacco, homosexuality, gambling, sex before marriage, abortion and pornography.

One of the aspects at the heart of Mormon life with which Ryan certainly connected was the warm sense of community – he found this coming together with like-minded people to be positive and comforting. He especially liked the services, which gave him an opportunity to sing in church, as he later told Beliefnet: ‘There’s good things about going to church. Being Mormon socialized me at a young age. You have to pray in public, shake a lot of hands, talk in public, sing in church, stuff like that.’

Thomas Gosling was often away travelling for work. This was natural, given that he was a salesman for the print mill and was often out on the road, selling his company’s services to prospective new clients and expanded contracts to existing ones. On account of his father being away so much, though, from a young age Ryan grew up very attached to his mother and sister, and he has often said that he became conditioned by their feminine company. He later talked about that feminine influence in an interview with The Sunday Times, saying, ‘I feel that I think like a girl, just through osmosis, really, living with my mom and my sister. They talk so much. If you live in a house with just women when your brain is forming, well, I think my thought process became more similar to a woman’s. I talk to my friends and I feel a connection. A lot of my friends grew up with single mothers. And it’s like we communicate differently. I never spent a lot of time around guys.’

If comments Ryan later made to The Toronto Star are anything to go by, his early school years were happy ones. ‘Canada’s a really beautiful country,’ he told them. ‘And it was nice to grow up in such a multicultural place where racial differences never really entered my mind. I went to kindergarten with people of every colour of the rainbow and my first crush was on an Indian girl.’

As his education began, he started to have intense daydreams. He later told The Sun that, in these daydreams, he’d want to place himself in the same realm as cars: ‘I also stood in the middle of the street trying to get hit by cars, not because I wanted to die but I wanted to be where the cars were.’ This seems to be an early example of how effectively Ryan could transport himself deep into an altered reality and really believe it – something he would come to do so effectively as an actor.

He also got up to a lot of typically boyish mischief, giving his parents a hard time, as he later recalled in an interview with the Daily Telegraph: ‘From as early as two years old, I was sneaking out of the house, never wearing my clothes, breaking things, putting the cat in the drier and setting the house on fire. I also remember that I kept stealing a girl neighbour out of her house. It was when we were both about two. I’d steal her away and try to take her on dates!’

Taking his mind off such mischief, when Ryan was six, he was introduced to the spectacle of public performance and entertainment via an uncle.

The relative in question was Ryan’s uncle Perry, who was a massive Elvis Presley fan. In his spare time, he put on an Elvis impersonator act under the stage name of ‘Elvis Perry’. The way Ryan tells it, his uncle bore little resemblance to Elvis Presley, yet he believed so wholeheartedly that he made a great Elvis impersonator that his performances – at least from where his nephew was standing – were phenomenal: so exciting, so dynamic, that his credentials for putting on a tribute show seemed impossible to challenge.

Ryan has spoken of tagging along with Uncle Perry as he put on his show in venues such as shopping malls. Watching from the wings, with a child’s large eyes, as his uncle gyrated and belted out his Elvis songs, he saw how he would drive his audiences to wild, enthusiastic applause. MSN Movies quoted his recalling how he felt about joining his uncle’s performances: ‘Suddenly I’m in the act – I’m head of security and I have this jacket, and I’m walking out and I can hear all these screaming people and suddenly my uncle, who has a moustache, a birthmark and no hair and looks nothing like Elvis, he became Elvis. He gets on stage and he’s amazing.’

Ryan was also fascinated by the way his uncle assumed this theatrical persona, and would linger transfixed before the shows as Perry changed into his stage costume – more often than not, a jumpsuit – and worked his hair into a perfect, reverent Elvis quiff. Those foundation basics prepared, Ryan would then watch his uncle add decorative jewellery. This process of assembling a character for performance would prove supremely influential later on when Ryan would develop a character for a part he was playing, as he recalled to MSN Movies, ‘I was six so I didn’t really know what I wanted but I’m sure that that had to have something to do with it. He taught me how to build a character.’

When you think of Ryan agonising over choosing the perfect brand of toothpick for the Driver to chew on in Drive or gaining enough weight to portray an inert character like Lars in Lars And The Real Girl, it’s hard not to trace the detail involved in that character development work back to those childhood outings where he’d watch his uncle transform himself, detail by detail, into not only an Elvis Presley impersonator, but also a confident showman.

At his uncle’s shows, as per a family joke, Ryan was known to serve as head of security. Of course, what he was really doing was tagging along and wherever possible assisting Perry in that desperately keen-to-be-involved-in-every-way manner unique to children. At the same time, like all young boys, Ryan looked up to his uncle and, in a theatrical sense, hero-worshipped the older relative. Ryan later said in an interview that his uncle used to perform a version of Elvis’ 1957 hit single ‘Teddy Bear’ and that his job was to theatrically hand him a teddy bear at a designated point in the song. He no doubt enjoyed that split second of being directly in the spotlight.

At home, like most children, Ryan and his sister loved to listen to bedtime stories. Ryan’s absolute favourite was for his mother to read a children’s book called The Giving Tree to him and Mandi. The book, by Chicago-born author/poet/cartoonist/songwriter/playwright Shel Silverstein, was first published in 1964 and tells the heart-wrenching, melancholy tale of the lifelong relationship between a small boy as he grows up and goes through life and a tree that grows and becomes old in tandem with the boy.

Much later, as character preparation, while making the film Blue Valentine, Ryan would have an illustration from The Giving Tree tattooed onto his upper left arm. The image is taken from the jacket cover to the book, where the little boy is standing beneath the tree, waiting to catch an apple falling from a branch. Ryan told Vulture what the book means to him: ‘That book is so fucked up; that story’s the worst. I mean, at the end the tree is a stump and the old guy just sitting on him; he’s just used him to death, and you’re supposed to want to be the tree? Fuck you. You be the tree. I don’t want to be the tree.’

After having enjoyed kindergarten so much, Ryan’s relationship with school changed and he began to experience difficulties with the other children, and with his studies. He stood out as a prime target for bullying and other children singled him out for a hard time.

He said later that school would have worked better for him if the pupils had been allowed to get up and walk up and down at the back of a classroom during lessons so they could burn off excess energy whenever they felt that they were losing the ability to properly concentrate on whatever the teacher was trying to tell them.

Faced with this dual academic and social isolation at school, Ryan did what most children experiencing such problems do: he retreated into himself and turned to TV shows and films as a portal to escape into. Later, he spoke of this suddenly difficult period in an interview with Company magazine, telling them: ‘I was a lonely child, I didn’t do well at school and TV was my only friend.’

He has said that he wasn’t particularly bothered about not having any close friends because he didn’t really want any – as a child, he was a contented loner, who regarded his mother and sister as his best friends.

One day, he was watching The Muppet Show on TV and the special guest star was the voluptuous actress Raquel Welch. The show was a re-run of Episode 11 from Season 3, which had originally aired in 1978.

In one scene in the show, Welch was involved in a song which required her – in typical, brilliant kids-pleasing Muppet Show fashion – to dance with a large, furry spider. In a prehistoric setting – obviously designed to reference her performance in the epic 1966 film One Million Years B.C. – she dances enthusiastically to Diana Ross’ disco-flavoured track ‘Baby It’s Me’ in high heels and a very skimpy dress, while the gigantic spider kookily sets about doing his best to mimic her every move.

Ryan told Company that he found this scene mesmerising, that it completely captured his imagination: ‘I immediately fell in love. She was the first crush I ever had and I thought, how do I get to meet this woman? And then I thought, well, she’s on TV, so to meet her I have to get on TV myself.’

Aside from being a very cute story, this was rather like Ryan’s anecdote about standing out in the street because he wanted to be where the cars were – only in this case, he had beamed himself into a scene in a children’s TV show and connected with an actress.

By this point, we can see a picture starting to grow of a young boy who loved the social, community aspects of being a Mormon (in particular, the communal singing and social get-togethers at church), but not the actual religion; a boy who was happy in the multicultural realm of his kindergarten and whose ‘first crush’ was on an Indian girl; a boy whose favourite children’s book was the philosophical tearjerker The Giving Tree; a boy who was incredibly close to his mother and sister; a boy who had trouble concentrating at school; a boy whose sensitivity and difference waved like a red rag to bullies at school; a boy who shared his mother’s love for the Beatles; a boy who did typical young boy things such as accidentally letting the handbrake off while mesmerised by the mechanics of his parents’ car; and, later, the kind of boy who dealt with feeling stressed out by life in school by escaping into TV and developing a crush on Raquel Welch as she danced in a satirically raunchy style with a large, furry spider in an episode of The Muppet Show.

Growing up as this cute, sensitive, internalised, alienated boy was setting Ryan up perfectly to play many of the alienated, internalised roles with which he would end up making his name.

(Continues…)Excerpted from The Biography Ryan Gosling by Nick Johnstone. Copyright © 2013 Nick Johnstone. Excerpted by permission of John Blake Publishing Ltd.
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