As Gosling says, director Gerwig Gosling offered the role of Ken some time ago. The script was the “best… [he’d] ever read,” he told host Jimmy Fallon, but wanted to take a moment and reconsider the decision in the fresh air.
As he walked into his backyard, he received a sign from the universe: an otherwise flawless, shirtless Ken doll, face down in the mud next to a “crushed lemon,” Gosling said.
Future Ken took a picture of the moving scene, perhaps a character from the universe, and texted it to Gerwig.
“I said, ‘I’ll be your Ken. Because his story needs to be told,'” Gosling told Fallon.
And although the film recently wrapped, Gosling continues to credit his beloved Mattel character wherever he goes, even as he promotes his other projects, and he fiercely defends Ken against critics.
“I was amazed at how some people would clip their beads around my Ken like they’d never thought of Ken for a second before!” Gosling said, pointing a mock angry, accusatory finger. “You never played with Ken!”
Then the conversation got somber and existential: “No one plays with Ken, man,” lamented Gosling. “He’s an accessory and not even one of the cool ones.”
This isn’t the first time Gosling has pondered the flaws in Ken’s seemingly lavish life. In an interview with Entertainment Tonight earlier this month, Gosling said life in plastic is a lot tougher than the life of the fictional mercenary he plays in Netflix’s The Gray Man.
“Ken has no money, he has no job, he has no car, he has no house,” Gosling said in a previous interview. “He’s going through some things.”
But the Barbie movie will be a lot more fun than Gosling’s devastating descriptions of Ken suggest, he assured Fallon this week.
“These aren’t plot details, these are just objective facts about Ken,” he said. “This is the Ken life.”
Until Barbie hits theaters in July 2023, we can only hope that the universe will continue to guide Gosling in cramming Ken into all of his interviews for the foreseeable future.