Well we're now going on about that long for Ryan Gosling.
It has occurred to me before that I haven't seen Gosling in anything lately, but it didn't occur to me exactly how long it had been until I looked it up on Friday night.
The occasion to look it up was Murder by Numbers, a 2002 detective movie that was among Gosling's first, which I stumbled across while scrolling through Netflix, on the rare occasion of having no idea what I want to watch on a Friday night. This one jumped out at me not for Gosling, but for Sandra Bullock, who I had mentioned in yesterday's post. (Yes, I wrote yesterday's post on Friday. It's a thing that happens a fair amount.)
It was only Gosling's fourth professional credit, and first since he had his breakout (among independent film fans, at least) the year before in The Believer. He would have been 21 during much of filming, still young enough to play a high school kid. And all the Gosling charm, moves, and gift for some unknowable sort of menace, were present from the start.
We haven't seen any of those things for a while.
Gosling's last credit on IMDB is in Damien Chazelle's First Man (2018), where he plays my uncle Neil Armstrong. (Not really my uncle.) As that was the sort of dedicated performance in which Gosling was surely striving for an Oscar nomination -- fruitlessly, as it turned out -- it seems strange to think that it was his last to date.
Rather than something arduous about that shoot appearing to have caused his ensuing absence, it seems that the reasoning was somewhat similar to Tatum's: fatherhood. According to what he and partner Eva Mendes -- who also no longer makes movies -- have said, they wanted their daughters to grow up outside the spotlight, and may have actually moved to Canada, Gosling's native land. Gosling has also made cryptic comments about movies being "not his favorite way to work."
Well, like Tatum, it looks like Gosling couldn't stay away either.
Gosling has about the same number of projects in the works as many other busy stars, which is notable in his case for the total absence of them since 2018. The one that's in post-production means that we're sure to get it, which is The Gray Man, set for release this year. The rest are three projects that are in pre-production and one that's announced. He'll appear in another Wolfman remake (currently titled Wolfman), which is another collaboration with Derek Cianfrance. He's supposed to play Ken opposite Margot Robbie in Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie, which should be a hoot. Then there's also The Actor and Project Hail Mary.
It shouldn't take a hail mary for Gosling to get back in the game. Like Tatum, he was fully entrenched in the A list, but unlike Tatum, Gosling was always thought to have real acting ability, not just the charisma to make certain roles work. Gosling's appeal crossed over -- nay, crosses over -- from discerning cinephiles to your average viewer, both of them appreciating his craft and swooning over the way he furrows his brow.
Tatum and Gosling make for an especially interesting comparison as they are both 1980 babies, both 41, though Tatum turns 42 next month. Gosling has another eight months of being 41.
I have more hope for Gosling's return to form than Tatum's, but the movies will definitely welcome them both back. Let's just hope that their returns are for good reasons, that they've figured out ways to make their work compatible with the parts of their lives that prompted them to give up Hollywood in the first place.
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