Fort Worth Star Telegram - Profile of Ryan Gosling

Talk to Ryan Gosling and you'll quickly get the sense that you're not getting the whole story. That the 21-year-old actor - who cut his teeth on The All New Mickey Mouse Club and Young Hercules, before breaking into movies with roles in Remember the Titans and the recent Murder by Numbers - is holding something back. Or maybe just playing his cards close to the vest.

Ask, for instance, how he approached the bravura opening sequence of The Believer (opening tomorrow at the Angelika Film Center in Dallas), in which his character terrorizes a Jewish student on the subway. Gosling will tell you that circumstance had more to do with the effectiveness of the scene than his acting ability did.

"We only had maybe two takes," he explains. "That was all we could afford. And we didn't have permits to shoot on those locations, so we had to get out in a half-hour. So you go for it and hope for the best." But then you look closer at the scene. Gosling has a wiry frame, but he moves his body with such sneaky force, and he grins with such insouciant confidence, that he could strike fear in a person twice his size. This scene gets at the heart of the entire character. He's a kind of egghead menace - a smart Jewish boy who wants to believe in Judaism but ends up consumed by the flaws and contradictions he feels the religion is founded upon. You realize that nothing about this audacious, carefully controlled performance could have been a fluke. Gosling just has no intention of telling you how he did it.

His ambition is a big part of why I chose him," says Henry Bean, the writer and director of The Believer. "It's the small level of ambition - I think he wants all the accolades and the celebrity. But I also think it's the grand ambition. He's deeply drawn to the most challenging stuff and the most glorious stuff."

And it's his ambition that Gosling himself tries to downplay when you talk to him. He was born in the small city of London, Ontario, on Nov. 12, 1980. His father worked in a paper factory; his mother was a stay-at-home mom. He claims that the extent of his early showbiz experience was singing backup for his sister in local talent shows. He says that he never pestered his parents to take him on auditions and that when he beat out 17,000 other kids for a slot on The Mickey Mouse Club, it was just good luck.

"It was just something to do that day - go audition," he says. "I read about it in the paper. It wasn't supposed to become a career."

Other television work followed, mostly guest performances on children's programs like Goosebumps and The Road to Avonlea. Eventually, he landed the title role on Young Hercules, the syndicated television series that ran for 50 episodes in 1998 and 1999.

Gosling claims that even after he landed in the ensemble of Remember the Titans, as one of the high school football players coached by Denzel Washington, that he was "just having a good time, learning about stuff, learning about film."

Talk to those who have worked with Gosling, however, and they don't entirely corroborate his happy-go-lucky story. "If there was six guys in the shot, there is a reason that you notice Ryan in the background," says Boaz Yakin, who directed Remember the Titans and who has since become close friends with Gosling.

"He's doing a little thing, or making some little expression - just being slightly separate from the pack. Ryan just perfectly knew how to steal a little attention for himself, but not in a way that wasn't within what the scenes were about."

Gosling did more than steal scenes in this year's Murder by Numbers, in which he and Michael Pitt played two Leopold-and-Loeb-style teen-age murderers trying to outsmart a forensics investigator (Sandra Bullock). He pretty much stole the whole movie. In fact, just about every review emphasized how much more interesting the film would have been had it been more focused on the two killers.

But again, Gosling demurs. He says there is never any intention of stealing scenes or of trying to draw attention from the other actors. "It's not nice when people rake a movie over the coals and yet give you kudos," he says. "Your objective is not to give a good performance but to make a good film. It's not fair to anyone in the film who worked just as hard. It was never a competition. It was a group effort. My performance is only what it was because those other people were in it. "

Maybe the modesty is genuine. But it rings a little hollow, too, especially after just about everyone who has ever worked with Gosling repeats the same things about him. They describe a young man who approaches every creative decision with intelligence, self-awareness and care. This is a young actor, they say, who knows exactly what he's doing.

"When I was first on Murder by Numbers, I was knocked out by how he was able to see the world the way that character would see it," says Henry Bean, who did an uncredited rewrite on the Murder by Numbers script. "He's had next to no education, but his capacity for reading deeply into something is very impressive."

Andrew Smith, who co-directed Gosling in The Slaughter Rule, an indie drama that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, recalls a conversation he had with Gosling about his approach to his character of Roy, a high school football player in rural Montana.

"When he gets a script, he goes through each line, and he uses colored pencils to shade the feeling of the character at different moments," Smith says. "At some point, we were just sort of admiring his technique, and he said the most flattering thing I've ever heard. He said, 'I don't have enough pencils for this character.' I felt the same way about him. We couldn't give him enough scenes and enough shots."

Of course, with Gosling's commitment and intensity also comes a certain degree of ego. "I think he has a sense of his own depth," Smith says. "He definitely has his own ideas. Sometimes, if you don't necessarily agree, he'll give you a look that says, 'Well, you'll be sorry.' "

With The Believer - which premiered at Sundance in 2001, aired on Showtime in April and is now finally getting theatrical distribution - Gosling took on a huge challenge. His Danny is forced to conceal his Judaism as he allows himself to be drawn ever deeper into a conspiracy that seeks to bomb a New York City synagogue. But what makes Danny so fascinating is that he is driven as much by his love for Judaism as his hatred of it. He can't simply embrace atheism and move on with his life. He instead becomes determined to obliterate those who can find sustenance from their faith. It's a multifaceted, dizzyingly complex portrait of self-hatred - not something you see very often in American movies.

When Gosling talks about the part, he says, "All of it was in the screenplay. I get a lot more credit than I deserve for that film." But then he continues - and he at last reveals flashes of the drive and determination behind his self-effacing demeanor.

"I said to myself, if I don't pull this off, well, then, I know that I can't be an actor," Gosling recalls. "Because parts don't get better than this. This is an opportunity of a lifetime. To fail at it and then ask for another one - that felt like too much to ask. So I said, if I can look at myself on-screen and not see myself, then I'll stick this out. And I'll try to make more movies."

Is Gosling too intense, too canny, too ambitious for his own good? Is he in danger of burning out before he reaches his full potential?

"He is really hard on himself," says screenwriter-director Boaz Yakin. "I think one of the best conversations we had was when I told him, 'Ryan, this is a fun job. It's a lot of work, it's a lot of responsibility, but you can also have a lot of fun doing it. Don't forget it's fun.' Maybe with the pressure of doing really good work in these parts, Ryan is forgetting that a little bit."

The actor David Morse (Proof of Life, Dancer in the Dark), who co-stars with Gosling in The Slaughter Rule, says that Gosling's biggest challenge may be in having to resist his own hype.

"Someone like Sean Penn, when he first started acting, everyone said he was going to be the next De Niro," Morse explains. "It puts just an enormous burden on a young actor, to have that kind of junk going on. I will say that the qualities he has as an actor are as good as anyone I have ever worked with. Anything else is going to be taken care of by experience. But I think he's going to struggle a little bit."

Gosling has just wrapped production on The United States of Leland, a drama in which he plays the killer of an autistic child; his co-stars are Chris Klein, Don Cheadle and Kevin Spacey, who is one of the producers of the film. (It will likely hit theaters next year.) Gosling adds that he's at the juncture in his career where he is "finding out what I can do and what my limitations are."

Has he discovered many limitations thus far?

Without missing a beat, and without revealing a thing, he says, "I won't name them. I'll try to hide them as much as I can. That's top-secret information."

- Christopher Kelly