Ryan Gosling and Steve Carell Were Once in a Short Superhero Movie, But Nobody Noticed

Summary:

• Before becoming one of Hollywood’s best actors of the recent decades, Ryan Gosling and Steve Carell starred in a 1999 low-budget short film which became one of the pioneers (though not very high-grade ones) in the superhero world.
• The actors appeared in opposing roles with Gosling being a superhero team’s member and Carell coming from the villain’s side.
• Despite the film’s failure, it didn’t impede Gosling and Carell’s careers to skyrocket a little bit later.

We will probably never get to see Ryan Gosling or Steve Carell in any superhero movies, but the reason for it may be the fact that they already had that experience.

Before both found projects that eventually skyrocketed their careers and set specific directions for their acting paths, both actors appeared together in a short superhero film — and their opposition is everything we need.

If someone ever thought that 1999’s Unbelievables was an early Marvel-ish attempt, such a view needs to be immediately debunked — the film, directed by Ed Solomon who had released Man in Black before in 1997, is more about a suburban version of a superhero team that pretends to fight with the evil forces while nobody really asked for it.

Ryan Gosling, who at the time was only 18, got to portray one of the team’s members Josh, the son of Action Armstrong who, in his turn, is one of the main superheroes in there.

Gosling’s character is pretty much downgraded compared to his father — having some superior skills, Josh wastes them on totally nonsense stuff like trying to slam dunk a basketball using his ability to fly.

We probably would never expect it to happen, but Steve Carell in Unbelievables stuns as someone who pretends to be a villain while being not more than just an acolyte for Tim Curry’s real villain.

As the latter’s performance is expectedly full of drama and stilted speeches, Carell’s character is some sort of a prediction of the actor’s future comedy career. Despite a lot of efforts put into his image of a bad guy, Carell’s character instead is more about a funny guy that has a cartoonish way of talking that happens to be even more comical with his feigned New York accent.

Though they didn’t succeed after a short with a seemingly promising theme that will conquer the whole cinematic world a couple of decades later, both Gosling and Carell found their career boomers shortly after — and there’s a little chance that they have any regrets.