03/25/2026
The power of play. 💕 his girls were trying to make sense of something bigger than their understanding, so they played it out the best they could.
Gosling is promoting Project Hail Mary, which opened to a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes with 100% audience score. Inc magazine ran a piece titled “Ryan Gosling Is Going to Save Hollywood.” Rolling Stone went with “Ryan Gosling Saves the Universe and the Movies.” USA Today called it 2026’s first great movie.
But Drew couldn't help asking about another monumental movie of Gosling's: Barbie. His initial reason for saying no was practical and funny: the doll is 70 years old, has no crotch, and never wears a shirt. That’s a real problem for an actor trying to figure out what to play. There’s no character there. There’s a plastic torso.
His daughters gave him the character. They were holding a Ken funeral because someone in their life had arthritis and they needed to process it. They didn’t know what arthritis was. They just knew it was something that happened to people and they wanted to understand it, so they gave it to Ken and let him die of it. That’s a child using play to metabolize a world that doesn’t explain itself to them. Gosling recognized that Greta Gerwig was doing the same thing at a different scale.
The Ken in the mud beside the squished lemon is the image that unlocked the performance. His daughters owned Barbies. They played with Barbies. Ken was face down in the yard, abandoned, next to a piece of rotting fruit. Nobody cared about him. That absence of interest was the character.
Gosling played Ken as someone who exists entirely in relation to someone who doesn’t need him, and he found that dynamic in his own backyard before he ever performed a line of dialogue.
