As Gosling tells it, some time ago, director Gerwig offered Gosling the part of Ken. The script was the “best … [he’d] ever read,” he told host Jimmy Fallon, but he wanted to take a moment and consider the decision in the fresh air.
When he walked into his backyard, he received a sign from the universe: An otherwise-pristine, shirtless Ken doll, facedown in the mud next to a “squished lemon,” Gosling said.
The future Ken snapped a photo of the affecting scene, perhaps a sign from the universe, and texted it to Gerwig.
“I said, ‘I shall be your Ken. For his story must be told,'” Gosling told Fallon.
“I was surprised how some people were kind of clutching their pearls about my Ken, as if they ever thought about Ken for a second before this!” Gosling said, pointing a faux-angry, accusatory finger. “They never played with Ken!”
Then the conversation turned bleak and existential: “Nobody plays with Ken, man,” Gosling lamented. “He’s an accessory, and not even one of the cool ones.”
“Ken’s got no money, he’s got no job, he’s got no car, he’s got no house,” Gosling said in the earlier interview. “He’s going through some stuff.”
But the “Barbie” film will be much more fun than Gosling’s devastating descriptions of Ken make it out to be, he assured Fallon this week.
“Those are not plot details; those are just objective facts about Ken,” he said. “That’s the Ken life.”
Until “Barbie” hits theaters in July 2023, we can just hope the universe will continue to guide Gosling to wedge Ken into all his interviews for the foreseeable future.
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