Date : November 03, 2007

Like many young actors, Ryan Gosling often becomes attached to his leading ladies. He had a fling with Sandra Bullock when they co-starred in Murder By Numbers. He met girlfriend Rachel McAdams while they played lovers on the set of The Notebook. And in his latest movie, Lars and the Real Girl, his co-star was a silicon doll that he liked so much that after the shooting was over, he took her home to live with him.

The doll is named Bianca, and she's the love interest in Lars and the Real Girl. Gosling plays the title character, an introverted young man who can't form bonds with real people. Instead he buys the doll and introduces her to his friends and relatives as a missionary from Brazil whom he met on the Internet. He talks to her, takes her to parties (in a wheelchair) and to all intents and purposes, falls in love with her.

Like Lars, Gosling himself is weirdly protective of Bianca and her reputation. She's not a blow-up doll, he points out: she's a sex doll, which is different.

"She has beautiful little freckles and incredibly human eyes," he was saying just after Lars and the Real Girl had its premiere at the Toronto film festival. "It's like being in the room with a great statue. She has a presence. There's something really fascinating about her. Even on set, everyone was always getting close and staring at her, looking to see if she was looking at them."

Gosling -- and Lars -- aren't the only people who feel that way. There is a community of men who own sex dolls that they treat as companions. Gosling says he heard of one man who brings his doll to keep him company when he goes hang gliding. "They cook meals and have dinner with them. They lean on them emotionally."

He compares them to children with their teddy bears. "They love that teddy bear. They love it. And that love is real, and when they lose it, it's heartbreaking. It's possible to love something that doesn't love you back or love someone who's died. These are things we can all relate to. This film is a creative study of those things."

Lars is the latest in a gallery of memorable characters from Gosling, a 27-year-old Canadian whose breakthrough role -- as the young Jewish neo-Nazi in The Believer (2001) -- kicked off a series of remarkable performances, including a drug-addicted teacher in Half Nelson, for which he won an Oscar nomination, and an arrogant young prosecutor chasing Anthony Hopkins in Fracture.

But Lars was something special. "This is my favourite character I've played," Gosling says. "Absolutely."

He says that in many of his roles he explores the self-destructive part of his nature, and it reaches an emotional dead end. With Lars, though, it was different.

"This was endless. When you get into a place where you explore the goodness in you and the longing to be a part of something special, the power of your own belief, in the Don Quixote sense ... it was endless. I had endless ideas for this character because of his inherent goodness."

Gosling says it reminds him of a performance that could have been given by his favourite actor, Gene Wilder.

"Gene Wilder is my Marlon Brando. Gene Wilder will break your heart and make you laugh at the same time. And that's deep. There's something really profound about what he's able to do. It's transcendent. It's everything. He gives you everything at once and you have to decide what you feel about it." He adds that if Wilder had played Lars, "I think it would be the greatest movie ever."

Another inspiration is the classic fantasy movie Harvey, in which James Stewart portrays an alcoholic whose best friend is an invisible six-foot rabbit. Gosling loves that movie because there's nothing like it, it's a genre of its own. Lars and the Real Girl also reminds him of Harold and Maude and Being There.

"There's something about all of those things, they have the same quality, and I can't define it, and I feel like this film has it as well."

Gosling was born in London, Ont., and grew up in the small town of Cornwall. He had a tough time in school -- he got into fights and his parents took him out for a while to be home-schooled. To escape, he started taking dancing lessons.

"There were all these girls there," he says. "And I could go away on trips and it gave me a kind of freedom I was looking for."

He was hired as a dancer on The All New Mickey Mouse Club, working with newcomers Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake (he lived with Timberlake's family in Los Angeles). When he left the show, he realized that he couldn't make a living dancing, so he became an actor.

"It was a job for me for a long time, just a job. And it still is, in a way. I don't really consider myself an artist or it an art. I'm not sure what art is exactly, but I'm pretty sure it isn't something you get paid to do. So for me, I treat it like a job and in that sense it allows me to get better at it because I don't attach my identity to it. I can be objective about it."

Gosling has established a reputation as one of the finest actors of his generation, but he says he doesn't get too wrapped up in the pain and dedication of his craft.

"I think that stuff makes you a worse actor," he says. "The more bored I get with acting the better I think you can be at it because all your choices aren't so emotional ... you're able to be objective about the character and just do your job as opposed to trying to prove some point to the world and to yourself about who you are. You get in the way of the character in that case."

He makes it sound like a simple matter of mathematics. "All my characters are me. I'm not a good enough actor to become a character. I hear about actors who become the role and I think, 'I wonder what that feels like.' Because for me, they're all me. I relate to these characters because aspects of their personality are like me. And I just turn up the parts of myself that are them and turn down the parts that aren't."

Of course, it also helps to have a sympathetic co-star. Someone like Bianca.

"I actually formed a real legitimate bond with her," Gosling says. He says he felt more relaxed when she was around and she became an emotional support. He needed her because otherwise, he was out there on his own, acting.

"You never feel lonelier than between 'action' and 'cut,'" Gosling says. "It's just you."

Source : The Vancouver Sun