Ryan Gosling Got His Iconic Role Because He Wasn’t Handsome Enough

Summary:

• Ryan Gosling, who’s recently famously starred in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, revealed that he got cast for one of his breakout roles for quite a weird reason.
• The actor said that the director had considered him for the role because Gosling wasn’t handsome enough to fall in love with.
• Though Gosling doesn’t seem to hold a grudge as he later explained that had totally got the director’s idea.

Ryan Gosling may be everyone’s favorite Ken right now, but even back in the day there were some people who didn’t see the actor’s potential male lead — and it has to do with the movie that brought Gosling to the place where he currently is.

In 2004 Ryan Gosling rose to exorbitant prominence after starring in the romantic drama The Notebook alongside Rachel McAdams. Based on Nicholas Sparks’ book of the same name, the film follows the elderly couple of Noah and Alison Calhoun who spend the rest of their days in a modern-day nursing home.

The main dramatical twist of the whole story is that Alison suffers from dementia and doesn’t even recognise her husband and visiting children, thus Noah chooses to read her a romantic novel that recounts their love story.

Twenty years after The Notebook’s release, the film is a doubtless classic romcom, and Ryan Gosling is one of Hollywood's top actors, though it wasn’t always like that. There’s one particular old interview of Ryan that is currently circulating in the media — in there the actor has shared some never-heard-before details of his cast as Noah.

Thus, Gosling revealed that he had even left behind Hayden Christensen, who had also been considered for the role, and eventually had got to be in the movie, but for one quite obnoxious reason — the director Nick Cassavetes didn’t think Gosling was handsome enough to be a romantic lead.

Sounds quite controversial, but the actor explained further that, according to Cassavetes, “anyone’s gonna fall in love with Brad Pitt” and the same was very unlikely to happen in Gosling’s case.

Though there’s no need for Nick Cassavetes to be canceled — as the actor clarified, he and the director later had sat together to discuss the film and Gosling had got Cassavetes’s idea about the leading man qualities that the actor supposedly hadn’t had.

And now that Barbie is out, there's solid proof that Ryan Gosling is kenough.