Date : April 6, 2004

LOS ANGELES, April 5 — When the actor Ryan Gosling was about 8, he says, he came home from school beaten and bloody. It was not the first time that had happened, and his mother ordered him back to school to bloody his tormentors.

So he did. Mr. Gosling, 23, recalled the incident: "I walked into school. Everything got really quiet. I found one of the kids in front of a urinal. I smacked his face into the tile, and he bled. The other kid was at his desk. I picked up a math textbook and made his nose bleed."

Then he went home and told his mother what he had done. "I was crying," he said. "I didn't want to do it. I don't like violence. And she was so sad." He took a breath."I never went back to that school again."

That little boy grew up to be the sensitive young actor who has grabbed Hollywood's attention with performances in projects like "The Believer" (2001), an award-winning film in which he played the leading role, that of a Jew who becomes a charismatic neo-Nazi leader.

Now Mr. Gosling is starring in "The United States of Leland" as Leland Fitzgerald, an emotionally detached young man who has inexplicably murdered a mentally disturbed adolescent. At the centerpiece of a talented cast including Don Cheadle, Kevin Spacey and Lena Olin, Mr. Gosling manages to hold the viewer's attention with a kind of innocent intensity and a youthful pathos.

They are not qualities that he lacks in real life. Mr. Gosling is tall and handsome, though not conventionally so, with a slim, angular face and a slight frame slipped inside a pin-striped blazer. He has blond hair, a fuzzlike beard and faded blue eyes.

In a movie industry constantly on the prowl for young leading men, he looks very much like one possible answer to Hollywood's continual casting quandaries. Mr. Gosling has a principal role in the forthcoming period romantic drama "The Notebook," as a young man obsessed by love. And at the annual ShoWest convention in March, he was named the Male Star of Tomorrow by movie exhibitors, a sign that theater owners think that his is a face that can sell tickets.

Nick Cassavetes, director of "The Notebook," said he had no doubt that Mr. Gosling would become a major actor, and a major star. "He doesn't make a move that he doesn't feel," Mr. Cassavetes said in a phone interview. "I just think: he's 23, he might as well be 63 years old. He's like one of those freaks, he kind of gets it. He's honest, that's really what you want out of an actor."

Not that Mr. Gosling quite knows where he wants to be in the Hollywood pantheon. Even the ShoWest recognition threw him a little. "I was confused as to why I was there," he said, noting that mainstream theater owners did not show either "The Believer" or another cutting-edge film, "The Slaughter Rule" (2002), a football movie about male bonding. "I kind of felt it was an opportunity to say I appreciate their acknowledgment of those choices," he said.

But acting was not a likely career path. Mr. Gosling was born in London, Ontario, and reared in a small paper mill town called Cornwall, where he knew he did not fit in. "I was very lost when I was young," he says, allowing himself a quick swig of a Heineken. "I was finding my way."

His parents divorced, and Mr. Gosling had continual trouble in school. "I didn't play sports," he said. "I couldn't read or write. I was a brat, always in trouble." He was frequently beaten up. The school put him in a special education class, where he studied with mentally handicapped children. "My teachers thought I was stupid," he said. "So did I."

After the fight that led to his leaving school, Mr. Gosling's mother quit work to school him at home, helping him learn to read and write. She found creative ways to have him express his knowledge. "I gained self-confidence," he said. "In that time I felt, like, not so worthless."

But when he headed to high school, he felt again out of place, and dropped out. Fed up at 17, he got in his car and drove to Los Angeles — "somewhere where there might be a place for me," as he put it.

Though Mr. Gosling had no formal acting training, a Canadian agent took him on, and he won a brief role in a New Zealand television series (quickly canceled), then landed a spot as an extra in the Denzel Washington film "Remember the Titans," as a member of the football team.

But his first real acting job came in 2001 with "The Believer," an astonishing debut in which he played Danny Balint, a charismatic skinhead leader who happened to be Jewish. The movie, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, was so discomfiting to distributors (it is based on a true story) that despite the critical acclaim, the film barely made it into theaters.

But it was the role that convinced Mr. Gosling that acting could somehow provide an outlet for his own roiling emotions. "After I did `The Believer,' things changed for me," he said. "I felt I had a place I could put the things I had inside of me into." It convinced him that movies could be "something you could care about, be passionate about," he said.

He continued: "I was moved by it. It was like truth — it wasn't entertainment. I connected with how much Danny felt. His feelings consumed him. That's a theme in all my characters. They feel too much. They become fanatical. Leland feels so much that he can't feel at all."

Those characters seem connected, however unconsciously, to the lonely boy Ryan Gosling once was. Even his description of his roles sounds as if he might easily be describing himself. "I felt like Danny was not meant for this world," he observed. "Leland is definitely too sensitive for this life. If you're small and weak and sensitive, there's not much of a place for you here."

Mr. Gosling went on to talk about the Hollywood machine, how it makes him wary. He spoke about how his emotions sometimes betray him, and how movies can lie. "I don't feel people are portrayed accurately on film," he said. "People are more complicated. Life is more complicated. I've never seen any love like movie love."

A couple of weeks ago, Ms. Gosling's mother called him from Canada. "She said, `I have visions of you, and you're trying to stay afloat in this capitalist ocean,' " Mr. Gosling said. "She's afraid I'm being packaged." He paused. "My mother was always a very wise woman."

By Sharon Waxman

Source : The New York Times