Although it seems like he was born to play Ken, it turns out Ryan Gosling wasn’t immediately sold on his role in the new Barbie movie. But his co-star Margot Robbie was determined to have him join the cast.
“Margot was like, ‘Is it weird if I go to his house?’” the film’s director, Greta Gerwig, said in an exclusive interview with SiriusXM host Jess Cagle alongside Margot and Ryan, plus co-stars America Ferrera, Issa Rae, Kate McKinnon, and Michael Cera. “I was like, ‘Don’t go to his house! Stay put!’”
Margot and Greta even admitted to sending a barrage of unanswered texts to Ryan together in an attempt to convince him.
“In the end, I promised Ryan a present every day if he did the movie,” Margot confessed, “and then when he did do the movie, I was like, ‘Oh, s***. I gotta get so many presents.’”
She stuck to her promise, though, and showered her co-star with “Ken-related things” every single day on set, including a puka shell necklace and a horse-themed lunch box.
“A lot of things you’d find at a Tommy Bahama store,” Ryan explained of the gifts, “and then it sort of turned into Sharper Image kind of objects.”
Greta clarified that Ryan didn’t actually play hard-to-get when it came to joining the cast as Ken; the actor was just genuinely busy. But Ryan did doubt he possessed the right “Ken-ergy” to take the role at first, and the daily gifts from Margot helped keep him in the right mindset while filming.
“I thought there was no way she could keep it up. I mean, it was a long shoot,” Ryan said. “But every day, from Barbie, [there was] a pink present to Ken to sort of stoke his Ken-ergy.”
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