A long way from Mickey Mouse Club - The Globe and Mail                                       

So far Canadian Ryan Gosling has played mostly loners and social outcasts, and his latest role is no exception. But he's keeping his options open, SIMON HOUPT writes

By SIMON HOUPT

NEW YORK -- Ryan Gosling plays the title character in The United States of Leland, but you wouldn't know it from watching the Conan O'Brien show last week. When the indie film's producers sought to put a happy face on the dark drama, they sent forth Chris Klein, that all-American pretty-boy jock from American Pie, into the talk-show roundabout, rather than the little known Canadian-born Gosling, even though Klein has only a marginal role in Leland. That, as it happens, was just fine with Gosling.

"I don't think I would fare very well on those shows," he explains quietly, moving to lower the volume of Tom Waits's Small Change growling on his hotel-suite stereo. "I don't think it would benefit the movie if I went on, or the show that's having me on. I'd rather not cause any trouble."

Gosling is tall and thin and looks undernourished, an impression reinforced by the scruffy hitchhiker's beard he's growing. It seems too old for his face, a stab at legitimacy that a child might make to get on in an adult's world. He wears red tab Levis and a khaki green windbreaker zippered almost to the neck, and he hugs his frame for warmth against a flu on the mend.

His screen presence has been compared to that of a young Sean Penn, and Gosling bears some of that actor's notorious ambivalence about publicity. He's not exactly prickly - in fact, he can be gracious and jovial if treated with respect - but is something of a loner, and resistant to marketing. When people ask about his time on The Mickey Mouse Club, where he shared the screen with Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, he may brush away the question by saying he was young, he can't remember the details. Or if they ask about his reputation as a fine guitar player and the bizarre rumour that he was once under consideration for NSync, he'll give a low, indulgent chuckle and mutter that people like to exaggerate.

Gosling isn't being willfully enigmatic, he just doesn't want people minimizing his potential by labelling, classifying, and throwing him into a prefab package. He is a leading man with the supple constitution of a character actor, and he has the idealism of a 23-year-old.

"I like having options, and any time somebody decides that you're this and they put you into that category, it limits you," he murmurs. "I'd rather postpone that as long as possible, but it may be a price for being able to do what you want to do. I don't know exactly. I'm rebelling against it for the moment. We'll see how that pans out for me," he says with a shrug.

So far, things are panning out pretty well for a career which only sparked a few years ago when Gosling landed the lead in The Believer, a scorching drama about a neo-Nazi skinhead who hides the fact that he is Jewish.

The film was too controversial to receive a substantial release, but Gosling's performance gave whiplash to critics and casting agents who were suddenly scurrying to figure out where he'd come from.

That would be London, Ont., where Gosling was born before he and his family moved to Cornwall, Ont. His parents divorced and he and his sister Mandi lived with their mother, who home-schooled Ryan for a couple of years after he suffered one too many school-yard beatings. "I never had a good experience with school," he says with ironic understatement.

That rough-and-tumble adolescence surely informs his characters, most of whom have a hollow core of loneliness. After The Believer, Gosling took the lead in The Slaughter Rule, a bleak film about high-school football and masculinity set against the open Montana expanse. He then submitted to a studio picture, playing a homoerotic murderer in Murder by Numbers opposite Sandra Bullock, with whom he had a brief post-shoot romantic dalliance.

Leland finds him playing another social outcast, a loner who murders the autistic younger brother of his ex-girlfriend. In Gosling's hands, Leland is the sort of person who watches his own life like a film happening in front of his eyes: full of feeling, but unable to reach out and change what is going on. "I've kind of really liked to watch people," he nods, drawing a parallel to himself. "You have to keep a certain distance to do that."

It's all quite a distance from the chipper Mickey Mouse Club, on which he served two seasons. The series was shotin Florida, where Justin Timberlake's mother looked after Gosling. Like high school, that experience was less than fulfilling, since the producers realized shortly after Gosling arrived that he might not have been the best choice. "I think they were just trying to fill a Canadian quotient," he says. "The truth is, if you ever watch that show, you'd be hard-pressed to see me in it. I was in the opening credits, and that's it."

For those who never saw him on MMC or caught his lighthearted work on the brief YTV comedy Breaker High, the idea of Gosling as an entertainer - as opposed to an Actor - may seem absurd. He's even catching heat from some journalists who see his choice to appear in the forthcoming period romance The Notebook as some sort of betrayal of his gritty roots. But he defends the decision to take the role on the grounds that exploring another genre could help him develop as an actor.

Chalk it up to the home-schooling ethic, where education is self-directed instead of imposed from above. In the summer of 2005, Gosling is set to act alongside Benicio del Toro and Javier Bardem in a biopic about Che Guevara. Though the film will be shot in English, Gosling has taken it upon himself to learn Spanish. It will help influence how he shapes the character, one of Guevara's sidekicks. He insists that learning Spanish isn't such a big deal: He lives in California right now, and figures it's only right that he learn the language.

Still, he knows his status as one of the hottest actors in Hollywood will soon fade; he's seen too many next-big-thing actors come and go to be impressed with his own buzz. He suggests he may not even stay in acting forever. "I like having the option that this is not something that I have to do," he says. "That way I can approach each project on its own and not wonder about what it means in the grand scale of the career, so I don't start making business decisions."

So Gosling isn't just enigmatic with the public; he tells himself little white lies to keep off balance. "I think you have to make every movie like it's the last one. You have to be comfortable with the fact that if you died or something, that would be the last movie that you made, the last piece of art that you did, the last writing in your journal," he says. It may be that, after growing up with everything in flux, he has trouble with anything permanent.

In the meantime, there are some benefits to his new lifestyle. He's beginning to indulge an interest in things like wine and cheese. "A friend of mine works at a restaurant I went to and for dessert he brought me a cheese trolley. I'd never seen one before. I mean, there were cheese logs when I was a kid, at things we went to, and there was the Kraft singles, but that's it," says Gosling. "I mean I'd seen Swiss on cartoons, but I'd never had it - so when they brought out this plate, it was a whole new thing, they were all different, rich and creamy, and some were very sharp."

"You know, the truth is, cheese is a good gift," he continues, sounding like Will Smith's Pygmalion character in Six Degrees of Separation learning about the custom of giving people pots of jam. "You go to someone's house, you bring a nice piece of cheese, they may not know that they're going to be excited about it, but once they try it they will. And they're expensive, too," he adds, mentioning a cheese store that a chef friend of his goes to in L.A. "At this cheese store, you pay, like, 80 bucks - well, I don't pay 80 bucks for cheese, I don't like it that much. But there's 80-dollar cheese." He pauses, showing a nose for comic timing. "Oddly enough, the 80-dollar cheese is the mouldiest of all of them. You'd think it would be on a clearance sale, they'd try to move it."

Someone book this man on a talk show.