Toronto Sun Interview with Ryan Gosling

TORONTO -- Canadian kid Ryan Gosling has made a big jump onscreen from Mouseketeer to skinhead Nazi. It's an especially oblique turn considering that kids with Mouse credentials are more likely to become cheesy popstars.

And it's all the more dramatic, given that he plays a conflicted Jew-turned-Nazi whose hate gives way to perverse happiness as he plans the bombing of a synagogue. This in the same week that real-life terrorists went to their deaths smiling at their own martyrdom and date with Heaven.

The film is The Believer, based on the true story of a Hebrew school student expelled for his rebellious rabbinical arguments, whose bitterness leads him to become a white supremacist. It's been shrouded in controversy since its debut at the Sundance Film Festival (its Toronto Festival debut was this week), with the Wiesenthal Centre excoriating the film and its writer/director Henry Bean (Internal Affairs).

Gosling -- a veteran Canadian child actor from Goosebumps and Road To Avonlea, The Mickey Mouse Club and the New Zealand-filmed series Young Hercules -- was raised in Cornwall in a Mormon family.

"Mormonism is similar to Judaism in a lot of ways," says Gosling, "in terms of commitment and faith. Where Henry and I connected was my determination that I would never make a movie that slandered another faith. The film to me was less about a specific religion than about faith itself. Somebody read the script and told Henry, 'This is really good. I want to make a Catholic version.' "

Danny Balint (Gosling) is a thug who randomly beats up Hebrew students on subway cars and who falls in with a Nazi cell headed by Curtis Zampf (Billy Zane) and Lina Moebius (Theresa Russell). He also falls for Moebius' masochistic daughter Carla (Summer Phoenix), who begins to decipher Danny's obsession with things Jewish and begins her own fascinated outsider's course in Hebrew. Meanwhile, Danny encounters some of his old Hebrew school friends, who obliviously begin inviting him back to the synagogue.

"A lot of people were saying the movie was about self-loathing," Gosling says. "But when I read it, it was clear to me that this kid had so much faith he was choking on it.

"I mean, the disturbing thing for people to absorb is that Danny wants to be a Jew and he wants to be a Nazi. He's got a girlfriend who's a Nazi that he's teaching Hebrew to, who wants to read Torah, who makes him Yom Kippur dinner and comes to shul (school). And he's davening (praying) at a Yom Kippur service at the same place he's placed a bomb. He really is a Jewish Nazi and he's happy being that. And I always think of the point in the film where he asks, 'Do you think people ever commit suicide out of happiness?' "

Challenging, morally-ambiguous roles might not seem to be in the cards for a guy who spent two years in a toga in Young Hercules. And he admits that's been an obstacle.

"Understandably so. If someone came to me to read (for a part) and the last thing he did was Young Hercules, I'd have reservations about it. It took a good year-and-a-half of trying to be very focused and reading for people and showing them that that was then and this was now. I had to practically beg for The Believer."

Though he has one fairly big-budget credit in Remember The Titans, his plans mostly involve low-budget independent films, including the upcoming The Slaughter Rule, about six-man football, co-starring Kelly Lynch and Clea Duvall.

He's also collaborated with one of his childhood friends, now an L.A. film student, on a script about their boyhood in Cornwall. "Of 12 males in my family, I'm the only one that didn't go on to work at the Domtar paper mill," he says.

- JIM SLOTEK