Ryan Gosling misses Lars. In fact, at the Los Angeles press junket for the film, the Academy Award-nominated actor said he still feels attached to his character from Lars and the Real Girl. Gosling confessed he related to this particular, peculiar character more than any he’s taken on thus far in his career and said he believes there’s a little bit of Lars in everybody.
Written by Nancy Oliver (Six Feet Under) and directed by Craig Gillespie (Mr Woodcock), Lars and the Real Girl finds Gosling playing a shy man with lots of emotional baggage who falls in love with the most unlikely girl. Lars falls hard for Bianca, a doll-life synthetic doll he ‘met’ on the Internet.
Gosling feels Lars and the Real Girl is a totally unique film and one that’s hard for him to qualify. “Conceptually, it sounds funny,” said Gosling. “When I first heard of it I thought it was wacky, but it’s true. People do this. There is a whole community of guys out there that have these dolls, and they have very complicated relationships with them.”
“It’s interesting,” explained Gosling about the relationship between men and these dolls. “I think, for me it was not dissimilar from a kid’s relationship with his teddy bear. You love it and you go through really important parts of your life with it. You talk to it and if you were ever to lose it, it would be heartbreaking. I think his relationship is different from this community of guys that has them, because his relationship isn’t necessarily sexual, but it is romantic. He’s a big child and he has all this romantic love to give, and he doesn’t know how to do it. I think there is something really romantic about the film and the idea that love is not a transaction, that it’s something you can just give and it doesn’t have to be returned to you. You can love people who don’t love you back. You can love people who are dead and you can love…there’s all kinds of different ways to love and this is one of them.”
It wasn’t until Gosling got the script for Lars and the Real Girl that he became aware of these dolls. “I didn’t really research it very much because Lars isn’t really aware of that,” said Gosling. “He has no idea of that culture. He’s not aware that she’s a doll. In his mind she’s a -- I treated this more like a love story between two people and I chose not to research it. Afterwards I did a lot because it’s so fascinating. There is this documentary on the BBC about these guys that have these dolls and it's so interesting. There is a book called Still Lovers, which is a beautiful photographic essay of these men and their relationships with the dolls.”
Gosling didn't have much difficulty figuring out Lars because he was so relatable. “He reminded me of one of my uncles,” revealed Gosling. “He could have been a part of my family or something. I felt like I knew him and everything. It was a really great experience for me because a lot of the other things I’ve done, I’ve been investigating the self-destructive part of my nature. And this was the first time I really explored…you know, because Lars is kind of like a Don Quixote-esque character. He is the power of belief and whatever he believes is true. When Quixote goes into the courtyard of the castle and he’s talking to the prostitutes, he thinks they are royalty. And for that moment that he thinks they are royalty, they think they are, too. They play along, and for that moment it becomes true. And because he’s so positive, because he’s so good, and there is not a self-destructive part of his nature, he has a choice between going down a road that would end in a really bleak way, or he takes this road. Every chance he gets, when it could get dark, he goes for the light. And that’s his nature."
"For me, it was such fertile creative ground that the ideas for him were endless. I could do a scene a million times for him and do it differently every time because he exists in such a positive place, that so much can grow there.”
“I feel like what I learned from Lars is that you can never go far enough, and there was no room for any kind of -- you couldn’t play it safe in any scene because he’s just not that way,” said Gosling describing how important it was for him to get Lars right. “He’s not that conscious. So what it did kind of break down in a way for me was the difference between who we are, who we think we are, who we think people think we are, how you kind of go into these, you turn into five different people and there is one person trying to navigate all of those different agendas. So, for me, it was a really difficult character to play because I felt such a loyalty to the script and to the specialness of it, but at the same time it’s the kind of difficulty you look for.”
It didn’t take much time for Gosling to settle on the right look for Lars. “Those things, like I had a beard and I was shaving it off for the film,” explained Gosling. “Then I caught a glimpse of myself with the mustache and I saw him. I thought, ‘There he is.’ So the mustache just came that easily. And everything, for me, I have all these, what I think are great ideas about the character, and then they never make the movie. They are never very good. And then in the process of me trying to attain these goals, all these little things happen. They are things that are specific to each movie that I work on.
They are kind of things that just kind of happen. And all those mannerisms and stuff are not conscious, is I guess what I’m saying, or things that I plan. They just kind of happen. It’s up to the filmmaker whether he wants to put them in or not. And most films that I work on, directors always cut them out because they think they are distracting or something. Craig is great because he recognized they are specific to that character. And in Half Nelson they included a lot of that stuff too. Then when I finish the film they kind of go away.”
