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entertain
you... again
First they saved cinema with
Barbenheimer, now Emily
Blunt and Ryan Gosling
are joining forces
Let us
April 28, 2024
Culture
G O D
K N O W S
W H O
D I D
I T
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My Picks
of the
Week
Richard Morrison
l
I am hooked on BBC1’s police drama
Blue
Lights.
It’s really about Belfast. The Troubles
may have faded into history, but, as those
desperately overstretched cops discover,
the city’s other troubles — poverty,
drugs, intimidation — are far from over.
l
The Ukrainian conductor Kirill
Karabits is leaving the Bournemouth
Symphony after 15 years, having given
a crash course in symphonies by
unknown eastern European composers.
Wednesday’s concert at the Lighthouse
in Poole is typical, although the
composer of the main piece — lamenting
Chernobyl and the Stalin-era famines
— isn’t entirely unknown. It’s
Karabits’s father, Ivan.
l
My early years were spent in
Brighton and I miss the town’s mix of
the seedy and subversive. So I always
go to the dizzyingly eclectic Brighton
Festival (May 4-26). This year the
director is an inspired choice: the
screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce.
Richard Morrison is the Times and
Sunday Times chief culture writer
Cover
Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling.
Photograph by Austin Hargrave
Twitter/X
@timesculture @TheTimesBooks
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Arts
How Abba
conquered
the world
Books p21
4
Cover story
Ryan Gosling
and Emily Blunt discuss
typecasting, Oscars and their
first movie since Barbenheimer
6
Report
To charge or not to
charge — should our museums
remain free for all?
9
Theatre
Denise Gough on
returning to the role that made
her name
Critics
12 Television
Camilla Long
deep-dives into the world of
Channel 5
14
Film
Tom Shone’s verdict
on a steamy tennis movie
starring Zendaya
Books
23
History
How Anne
Boleyn’s French connections
helped her to the throne
26
Middle East
Damascus’s
journey from earthly
paradise to hell on earth
27
Fiction
Small-town
tragedies make for a perfect
book club pick
28
Children’s books
Ahoy!
Some very polite pirates
MICHAEL PUTLAND/GETTY IMAGES
TV & Radio
29
The best guide to the
week’s programmes
© Times Media Ltd, 2024. Published and licensed by Times Media Ltd, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF (020 7782 5000). Printed at Walstead Bicester Limited, Oxfordshire. Not to be sold separately.
Free books of the month
This April, read the award-winning
Killing Thatcher
by Rory Carroll and
After That Night
by bestselling
author Karin Slaughter. This month’s audiobook is
Free Your Mind
by Laura Dodsworth and Patrick
Fagan. It blends popular psychology, sociology,
politics and self-help to guide readers on to how to
resist everyday manipulation and influence.
Visit mytimesplus.co.uk
T&Cs apply.
28 April 2024
3
Cover story
W
hen Ryan Gosling was
growing up he loved big
movies — “Those high-
concept ideas, you know?”
He mentions
Cocoon, Big,
ET
and
Back to the Future,
brilliant lms with outline plots
you can write on a napkin.
“I also liked this action
lm
No Retreat, No
Surrender,”
he says,
beaming, “where the
ghost of Bruce Lee taught a kid how to
ght.” He shrugs. “See, I didn’t have an
arthouse cinema in my town, so lms
did not mirror life, but were, instead,
a portal to another world.”
Gosling was born in London,
Canada, in 1980. Three years later
Emily Blunt arrived, half a world away
in the other London. She too was
shaped by watching blockbusters. “I
saw
Jurassic Park
when I was 11,” she
says. “It was a big moment for me.”
Gosling leans in. “We are meant to be
promoting
The Fall Guy,”
he tells her.
“Stop promoting
Jurassic Park.”
We have met in Berlin, where the
duo hosted a premiere of
The Fall Guy,
and in person Gosling, 43, is, quite
simply, cool — dry, yet engaged, he has
the on-screen charisma of Paul
Newman and o -screen charm of a
man you would fully support your wife
leaving you for. Blunt, 41, meanwhile, is
a rare wry Brit in Hollywood.
The Fall Guy
is loosely based on the
goofy TV show from the 1980s starring
Lee Majors, and has Gosling playing the
stuntman Colt, who su ers an injury
that thwarts both his body and his
relationship with the director, Jody
(Blunt). Depressed, Colt takes a job on
a new project by Jody that also comes
with a dangerous mission.
It is the rst lm either Gosling or
Blunt has starred in since
Barbenheimer — that heady July
weekend last year when, after a surge
of Covid and streaming, lm fought
back.
Barbie
and
Oppenheimer
made
a combined total of $2.4 billion.
Gosling was Ken (who loved Barbie)
while Blunt was Kitty (who sort of
loved Oppenheimer) and even though
The Fall Guy
shares little with either, it
is very much a mass-appeal action
romance aiming to get people back
into cinemas.
“Right now,” Gosling says, “I crave
connection and common ground, and
movies can do that. We may disagree
on a lot, but we all like
Jaws.
And
predominantly I want something to be
entertaining. You can sneak in a
message, but people have important
things happening in their lives, so it is
important that they have fun.”
Gosling and Blunt used to be best
known for dark indie lms — Gosling in
Blue Valentine,
Blunt in
My Summer of
Love,
but, over the past decade, they
have both stuck to studio movies and
shunned the austere for things that
HOLLYWOOD’S
BIGGEST
After starring in the two
boldest lms of last year,
Emily Blunt and Ryan
Gosling are taking on
the daring world of
stunts — but, they
tell
Jonathan Dean,
family comes rst
people actually see.
The Fall Guy
is their
rst lm together.
“I do not remember those early days
of my career as self-indulgent,” Blunt
says. “But now I, weirdly, ask if I would
want to see this movie myself — and I
don’t think I used to ask that.” Gosling
nods along. “It is exciting to not really
be reactionary,” he adds, referring to
career choices that have seen him veer
from matinee idol in the schmaltzy
tearjerker
The Notebook
to the extreme
violence of the bloody car thriller
Drive.
He has, though, long had an image
to buck against. While Blunt started
after being spotted by an agent in a
school play at Hurtwood House, a
boarding school in Surrey, and then
working from the age of 18, Gosling
has been acting since the age of 12 —
via
The Mickey Mouse Club,
where
he became a teen icon (and was a
contemporary of Britney Spears,
Justin Timberlake and Christina
Aguilera).
The Mickey Mouse Club
gave
him a focus he lacked at school,
where he struggled with reading. He
was home schooled for a year and
encouraged to perform, which meant
he earned money to support his
parents (his father worked as a
travelling salesman for a paper mill,
his mother was a secretary and they
divorced when Gosling was a teenager).
Action stations
Ryan Gosling and
Emily Blunt in The
Fall Guy. Below
right, Blunt in
Oppenheimer
and Gosling as
Ken in Barbie
When I tell him that the
The Fall Guy
press notes said Colt needed to be
played by an actor with “charisma,
allure and unparalleled talent”, he
squirms and mutters: “I didn’t see
those notes.” His status as a heart-throb
appears to bother him. I ask whether
his darker follow-ups to
The Notebook
were an attempt to destroy the image
the lm created?
“Well, it’s more just trying to have a
career,” he says. “And wanting to keep
my healthcare. Because once you do
something, there’s a sense that’s the
only thing you can do. So, yes, I’d think,
how do I escape this box? It goes back
to
The Mickey Mouse Club.
I thought
about how I could do something to not
just be associated with that. A lot of
Disney kids go through that, so I found
this lm,
The Believer
[2001], about a
Jewish Nazi, and that gift-wrapped me a
career. But then I was only o ered very
dark things.
“So when the director Nick
Cassavetes said there was this romantic
lead in
The Notebook,
it gave me
another shot. He said he is a romantic
lead, but f***ing crazy. He writes a girl
a letter every day for 365 days. And
Nick said, ‘You’re crazy, you can do
this.’ And I was like, erm, ‘Thanks?’ But
then, suddenly, I’m just the guy from
The Notebook.
So I do
Drive.”
Emily Blunt
4
28 April 2024
COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL STUDIOS
After The
Devil Wears
Prada I was
o ered every
acerbic British
bitch going
RISK
TAKERS
I mention
Lost River,
a beautiful,
if divisive, arthouse drama set in the
Detroit slums that, to date, remains
Gosling’s sole directing credit. He shot
it ten years ago — will he direct again?
“Lost River 2?” I’m up for it … “But
directing takes so much time,” he
protests. “And, right now, my kids are
so little — it’s really 24 hours for us at
home right now. So, yes, in the future,
but right now my choices are more
about what’s great for my family.”
Would it have been hard to go back
home after a day of shooting
Drive?
“Oh, I couldn’t do
Drive
now, with my
kids at the age they are. I just couldn’t.
So these lms work perfectly, for where
we are at as a family right now.”
Gosling has two daughters,
Esmeralda Amada, nine, and Amada
Lee, seven, with the actress Eva Mendes
— he took on the role of Ken after seeing
a neglected Ken doll at home, face
down in the mud, and thinking:
“His story must be told!”
Blunt too has felt typecast.
“After
The Devil Wears Prada
[2006] I was o ered every
single acerbic British bitch
going,” she says. Now, though,
she is in the privileged position
where she can put her family
rst. Last year she
announced she was
I didn’t just
want to be
associated
with The
Mickey Mouse
Club
Ryan Gosling
taking a year o from acting to spend
time with her daughters, Hazel, nine,
and Violet, seven, and her husband,
the actor/director John Krasinski.
She had a lot of fun making
The Fall
Guy.
It’s directed by the former
stuntman David Leitch — who was Brad
Pitt’s double on
Fight Club.
A tough gig.
Leitch’s lm has opened calls for an
Oscar for stunts, for the people who
risk their lives, only for the actors to
take the credit.
The Fall Guy
goes hard
— one of Gosling’s doubles smashed the
world record by doing eight and a half
rolls in a car.
I ask which lm that they’ve made
needed the most stunts. “Edge
of
Tomorrow,”
Blunt answers, referring to
the underrated time-travel sci- ick
with Tom Cruise. “The suits were
so heavy I had a man being my double.”
Mostly, though,
The Fall Guy
is a
thank you letter to the unsung, the
behind-the-scenes crew. Gosling
tells a sweet tale about a prop
master who broke a mug that
Gosling’s character was using,
so it could be glued back
together to show that somebody
special had given the character
that mug, and he wanted to
preserve it. Nobody noticed
apart from Gosling. “There
are a lot of cynical lms
about Hollywood,” Gosling says. “But
we have one of the best jobs in the
world, so we wanted to turn a lens
on to all the people that really make
these lms, to honour them. And it’s
never their fault if the lm doesn’t
turn out well.”
Which takes us back to
Barbie
and
Oppenheimer,
which turned out very
well indeed. “Did you know,” Blunt
says with a smile, “that
Oppenheimer
is the highest-grossing lm about a
physicist — ever?”
Given it is three hours long, dialogue-
heavy and often in black-and-white,
I assume its success — and seven Oscars
— was beyond Christopher Nolan’s
wildest dreams? “It blew him away,”
Blunt says. “It shows that we must keep
giving great creative directors like him
the freedom and budgets they need.
Hollywood battles not with the ght
against bad, but against mediocrity.
It’s maddening. They keep everything
beige and don’t take risks.”
Barbie,
meanwhile, turned the
planet pink, as Greta Gerwig’s deeply
satirical branding exercise pushed the
boundaries of what a toy spin-o could
possibly be. For many viewers Ken was
the standout as Gosling put poignancy
into the plastic. Just ahead of the Oscars
Mark Ronson, who wrote the
centrepiece ballad
I’m Just Ken,
told me
that the song helped young men to
realise it was OK to be vulnerable and
how that was important in an era of
so-called toxic masculinity.
“I’ve heard those stories and, of
course, I love them,” Gosling says.
“I think Greta had more a ection for
Ken than any other character. Even
though she made a Barbie lm, she
was very conscious that she has two
little boys and so wanted to start a
conversation. I heard about a kid whose
girlfriend broke up with him and he’d
watch
I’m Just Ken
to make him feel it
was OK. Like, ‘I just wasn’t the right
person for her, but that doesn’t mean
there is anything wrong with me …’”
“There’s another Barbie out there,”
Blunt adds. “Exactly,” Gosling says.
And now “Ken is dead” — as Blunt
said on
Saturday Night Live
this month
in a skit with Gosling. The duo sung
a version of Taylor Swift’s ballad
All
Too Well
on the show, with lyrics about
the break-up of Gosling from Ken, a
cover that was praised by Swift. “Is it
weird that I cried when she said she
liked it?” Blunt asks. “I’m a massive
Swiftie and my daughters are obsessed.
She is their rst great passion — other
than Ryan Gosling.”
Her co-star makes a sound that’s half
protest, half panic, but, really, I do not
think I have ever met an A-lister more
comfortable in his own skin. A man
who was transported by big, fun,
movies as a kid and thought, hang on,
why don’t we bring them back?
The Fall Guy is in cinemas from May 2
28 April 2024
5

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