Date : March 9, 2008

Ryan Gosling's attitude got him fired by Disney when he was just 12 years old. Today it's made him one of the most terrifyingly intense actors in Hollywood, capable of making even an on-screen romance with a rubber doll seem believable. Will Lawrence meets the one-man talent pool.

If you go down to Ryan Gosling's house you're sure of a big surprise. In an upstairs window, gazing out over the neat lawn, sits a female sex doll. She is a high-quality sex doll, incidentally, and her name is Bianca. Bianca has a book carefully folded on her lap and a coffee cup at her side - her silent presence evoking something akin to an S and M version of a teddy bears' picnic.

Ryan Gosling: 'I remember I kept stealing a girl neighbour out of her house. It was when we were about two. I just wanted to be a man'

For the 27-year-old actor, she is apparently a source of comfort. 'Bianca is very much like a teddy bear to me,' says Gosling. 'She feels like a security blanket. My relationship with her is the same as a child's relationship with their bear. It is intimate and they love it, care for it and talk to it. If they ever lost the bear, it would be traumatic for them.'

Their relationship is now 18 months old, stretching back to the autumn of 2006 when Gosling signed up to play Lars Lindstrom in Lars and the Real Girl, an offbeat comedy-drama by the screenwriter Nancy Oliver, of Six Feet Under fame. The story recalls such films as Harvey and Being There, or the children's book The Velveteen Rabbit, and follows an introverted young man living a reclusive life in a snowy North American town. He is unable to engage with his fellow townsfolk until he meets a wonderful girl who transforms his life. His family and friends are delighted. Until they meet Bianca.

'It's really like a story book, it has a children's-book innocence to it, yet it deals completely with adult themes,' says Gosling. 'But the overall concept does sound nuts, doesn't it? My initial impression, when I first heard the idea, was that it was conceptually funny and unique, but I thought it was never going to hold up for a whole movie. But when I read the script, I realised I couldn't be more wrong.' The finished film, which is released later this month, vindicates Gosling's instincts: Lars and the Real Girl won an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay and Gosling's performance was Golden Globe-nominated.

Since breaking through in 2001 with The Believer - the shocking tale of a young Jewish neo-Nazi, which went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival - Gosling has built a career defined by deft choices, quickly becoming one of the finest actors of his generation. His charged performance opposite Rachel McAdams in the 2004 love story The Notebook was followed by his Oscar-nominated role as a crack-addicted teacher in Ryan Fleck's Half Nelson. In Lars and the Real Girl, he plays another man dislocated from his surroundings and, although the supporting cast, which includes the indie stalwarts Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson, is superb, it is Gosling's portrayal of a bizarre yet strangely affecting relationship that holds your attention. It's almost as if he and his co-stars are in different films.

'That's true, it is like I'm in a different movie,' he says, 'and they're both great films. While everyone was building their relationships, I created one of my own with Bianca. I ran dialogue with her - like we were in our own silent movie. She would talk and I would talk. We'd have fights. I know it sounds crazy, but Bianca became fascinating, and that's why I have taken her home and put her upstairs. You could see the effects on everybody, not just me. A lot of people working on the crew thought that the whole thing was ridiculous, but you could see them, over the course of the movie, forging their own relationships. At one point I would see a grip on his own with a cup of coffee next to Bianca sitting talking to her.'

I meet Gosling at the Toronto Film Festival. This is home turf for the actor, and a phalanx of photographers and excited fans - mostly teenage girls - swarms around him whenever he emerges from the relative safety of an interview, premiere party or press call. As he settles into one of ?Toronto's pricier hotel suites, his 6ft frame wrapped in jeans and V-neck jumper and with a flash of ruddy stubble streaking across his chin, he seems slightly crumpled, deflated even. He could be suffering from the previous night's excess - it is the day after the film's premiere. He speaks slowly and quietly, beginning three or four sentences before settling on an answer.

He was born in 1980 in the small town of London, Ontario, just 100 miles away, before moving to Cornwall, a paper-mill town, when he was a toddler. His parents, Thomas and Donna, are devout Mormons. 'My parents were pretty religious,' he says, 'but when people read about that, I often think it's taken out of context. It's always written that I had this "strict Mormon upbringing", but that's not true at all. To my parents' credit, and to my mother's specifically, they were always saying, though they were religious, "This may not be for you."

'It all started because my sister wanted to go to church as a kid and my parents went with her. Then some missionaries came to the door, spoke to my parents, and it all seemed to work for them. But for some reason, I could never identify with it.'

Indeed, Gosling had a difficult childhood in which he struggled, like some of the misfits he portrays, to identify with his peers. He did poorly at school. He was bullied. He would fight with his classmates. 'I feel really bad for my mother, because it never stopped. From as early as two years old, I was sneaking out of the house, never wearing my clothes, breaking things, putting the cat in the drier and setting the house on fire. I also remember that I kept stealing a girl neighbour out of her house. It was when we were both about two. I'd steal her away and try to take her on dates!' As his behaviour became more unruly, Gosling's mother abandoned her job to home-school him. He remains grateful for her sacrifice.

'Honestly, none of my behaviour was prompted by my home life,' he says. 'It was more that I just wanted to be a man, have a job, a real place, date girls and get on with it. I didn't like the idea that my schedule was mapped out for me and I didn't have much choice in the matter. I'm sure every kid feels that way but I obsessed over it, and if I hadn't got out and started working, I'd be in a lot of trouble now. I'd probably be dead. Being a kid made me crazy; I was doing crazy things because I felt very claustrophobic and panicky.'

Gosling would escape the feelings of panic by watching television. 'When I was growing up, television was my best friend,' he says. 'I was always watching it. In fact, when I was punished, my punishment was that I could not watch TV. Obviously, Thundercats was one of my best friends. The Muppet Show, too. I loved it. In some ways it was why I wanted to become an actor.'

In early 1992, Gosling travelled to Montreal to audition for Disney's The All New Mickey Mouse Club, the 1990s revival of the children's variety show. He and his sister had taken dancing lessons in Cornwall - 'I knew that all the girls were there, and it was something that got me out of school' - and his twinkle-

toed endeavours paid off when Disney recruited him as a 'Mouseketeer', alongside Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake.

The story goes that Gosling was such a bad influence on the future popstrels that their mothers complained to the studio. 'I was just telling them what I'd heard about sex,' he says. 'You know, the positions and stuff.' Disney, unsurprisingly, hauled young Gosling into its offices: 'Disney had a meeting with me, and they were like, ''You're not Disney material. We're gonna kick you off the show if you say anything sexual again." I'm f---ing 12. All I care about is sex! How can I not talk about it? I don't know what they expected.'

When he turned 16, Gosling moved to Los Angeles, and after working on a variety of TV shows, he was cast as the hero in the series Young Hercules, produced by the Spider-Man director Sam Raimi. He secured his first feature role with 2001's Remember the Titans, and then filmed The Believer and the indie flick The Slaughter Rule, before earning good reviews for his performance as one of the killers in the psychological thriller Murder By Numbers, alongside Sandra Bullock.

Method man: with Emily Mortimer and Paul Schneider in 'Lars and the Real Girl'

He hit the headlines when he went on to date Bullock. It was his role in The Notebook, however, that brought him to international attention, securing the first of his many (unwanted) appearances on magazine 'hot' lists, and his second high-profile romance. Such was the interest in his relationship with his co-star, Rachel McAdams, that when the couple split up last year, 'one girl came up to me on the street and almost smacked me. Like, "How could you let a girl like that go?"??'

Despite his intense dislike of media scrutiny, Gosling is less wary than he used to be. 'I used to really resent the whole interview process,' he explains. 'I had this fear that I'd become this really polished person. If you do enough interviews, you become conscious of what works and what doesn't, what stories are funny, what things to go over and you are kind of expected to dictate how this experience goes, and you start to play this character who is a sort of polished part of your personality. I'd stop and think, "Who wants to be that guy?" But I've become more relaxed about it now. You can ask me what you like.' So I do.

'No, I'm not dating anybody right now,' he smiles, with a shrug. Earlier this year, there were rumours that he was dating Michelle Williams, the former girlfriend of the late Heath Ledger. She was Gosling's co-star in the now-postponed romantic comedy Blue Valentine. Both Williams and Gosling have denied the rumours. 'I'm single, and it's cool,' he says. To his countless female fans, this news will be very 'cool' indeed. He has gained a few pounds, courtesy of his abortive stint on The Lovely Bones, an adaptation of Alice Sebold's harrowing book, directed by Peter Jackson. Gosling gained an extra 10lb to play the part of Jack, husband to Rachel Weisz's Abigail, but left the production citing 'creative differences'. Mark Wahlberg replaced him.

he rumour-mill began to turn the moment Gosling left the set, and some suggested that the actor had been fired. He refutes this, as do the filmmakers, saying that the director and star had a difference of opinion. 'The simple fact was that I felt I was too young,' says Gosling. 'I was 27, playing the father of a 14-year-old. To begin with, we thought it could work, but then I realised that it had the potential to be very distracting. And if it distracted us from the important theme of the film, then it just wasn't worth it.'

Anyone who has worked with Gosling will attest to his professionalism. Whether he likes the term or not, he is the most 'Method' of Hollywood's young actors, exploiting the rebellion and exclusion of his youth to capture characters who are waging war on themselves. To research the teacher he played in Half Nelson he moved to Brooklyn and shadowed a middle-school teacher, as well as educating himself in the Civil Rights movement he would be teaching on screen. 'I did a lot of crack, you know. A lot. It was cheap, so it was no big deal. I used my per diem for it,' he says with a smile. 'No, I'm just kidding. I didn't get a per diem!'

We have already seen Gosling's devotion to Bianca, his prosthetic princess in Lars and the Real Girl, and the actor notes that his almost obsessive involvement with his characters requires a particular outlook. 'When I work, I remember to tell myself that it's just a job to me,' he says. 'I don't consider myself an artist. I just treat it like a job and that way it allows me not to lose my identity. Honestly, it's possible to lose your identity or to start to link your identity to the role. I've seen that happen all around me in Los Angeles.'

It's scary to imagine the lengths that Gosling might go to if he accepts the part of Kurt Cobain in the forthcoming Nirvana biopic. Whether he will take the role, alongside Courtney Love's other first-choice star, Scarlett Johansson, remains to be seen. He's also been signed up to take over from Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck in a 'reboot' of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan franchise. 'There are so many films you see that are big hits, but then they disappear and three years later you can't remember whatthey are,' he says. 'I want to make films that remain.

# 'Lars and the Real Girl' is released on 21 March

Source : Telegraph UK