Ryan Gosling was recently asked by The Wall Street Journal Magazine if there is any role from his Hollywood career that he’d like to do over again. The answer is surprisingly “La La Land,” Damian Chazelle’s acclaimed 2016 musical that earned Gosling an Oscar nomination for best actor and won his co-star Emma Stone the Oscar for best actress. Chazzelle won best director. So why would Gosling want to do it again? It all comes down to a dance mistake that continues to haunt him.
“‘La La Land.’ There is a moment that haunts me,” Gosling said. “We’re dancing, Emma and I, and I didn’t know this would become the poster for the movie. We were supposed to have our hands up, and I thought it would be cool to put my hand [more flat] even though everyone told me it wasn’t cool. I was sure it was cooler.”
“Now when I look at it, and I have to see it all the time, you know what would’ve been cooler…[the intended pose],” Gosling admitted. “It just killed the energy that way. I call it La La Hand.”
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The interviewer informed Gosling that his flat hand on the “La La Land” poster is called “hamburger hands,” to which the actor quipped back: “Hamburger hands Gosling over here.”
“La La Land” marked a huge shift in Gosling’s career as it was the first role he remembers taking on behalf of his family. The actor told The Wall Street Journal Magazinethat he is not interested in darker roles at this stage in his career because of his responsibility to his family.
“I don’t really take roles that are going to put me in some kind of dark place,”Gosling told the publication.“This moment is what I feel like trying to read the room at home and feel like what is going to be best for all of us. The decisions I make, I make them with Eva and we make them with our family in mind first.”
“I think ‘La La Land’ was the first,”Gosling added about when he started to shift his career. “It was just sort of like, ‘Oh, this will be fun for them, too, because even though they’re not coming to set, we’re practicing piano every day or we’re dancing or we’re singing.’ Their interest in ‘Barbie’ and their disinterest in Ken was an inspiration. Ithought, theywere already making little movies about their Barbies on the iPad when it happened, so the fact that I was going off to work to make one too, we just felt like we were aligned.”
Watch Gosling’s full video interview with The Wall Street Journal Magazine in the video below.
