Ryan Gosling Shares the One Movie Performance He’d Like to Redo
In a new video interview with Wall Street Journal, Ryan Gosling revealed that he’d like to reshoot one of his most iconic performances in the Oscar-winning musical La La Land. Gosling starred alongside Emma Stone in the 2016 romantic drama, about two young artists struggling to make it in Hollywood.
“There’s a moment that haunts me where we’re dancing, Emma and I,” Gosling admitted to WSJ of the film’s most well-remembered sequence, which finds him and Stone waltzing up the road leading to Griffith Observatory. “I didn’t know this would become the poster for the movie.”
Gosling went on to explain that the scene haunts him due to some poorly choreographed hand work on his part. “I thought we were supposed to have our hands up, and I thought it’d be cool to put my hand like that,” the actor said, pointing his wrist in a flat horizontal direction rather than directly into the air, as Stone’s hand is in the scene and on the poster.
Dale Robinette/?Summit Entertainment/Courtesy Everett Collection
But the Barbie actor persisted, “even though everyone told me it wasn’t cool,” he said with a shrug. “Now when I look at it—and I have to see it all the time—you know what would have been cooler than this?” Gosling asked, holding his palm flat as he did in the film. “That,” he cracked, shooting his hand directly into the air to mirror Stone’s pose.
Gosling reflected to WSJ that, more than anything, he regrets that his “lazy” hand movement dulled the finale of that particular sequence. “It just killed the energy that way,” he lamented, half-seriously. “It was sort of like, all leading to what? Just like a lazy…I call it La La Hand.”
Later in the interview, Gosling was asked if his formal dance training as a Mickey Mouse Club child star served any purpose when he arrived on the La La Land set.
“I thought it would help,” Gosling quipped, “and then, of course, hamburger-hands Gosling over here. It didn’t help me at all in the end.”
Gosling is on the publicity trail promoting David Leitch’s new action-comedy The Fall Guy, which hits cinemas today.