Boston Globe with Ryan Gosling

NEW YORK - If you're not a Disney Channel devotee, you probably haven't seen Ryan Gosling before. Not so long after leaving the "All New Mickey Mouse Club," where he worked alongside Britney Spears and members of 'N Sync, the 22-year-old Canadian newcomer made three films in rapid succession.

But the first two have been delayed so long that his third movie, "Murder by Numbers," is hitting screens first. "I never thought you could make a movie and it wouldn't come out," says Gosling. A thriller about two teens who kill for the hell of it, "Murder by Numbers," which opened Friday, doesn't offer much sense of the breadth of Gosling's career so far. It does put plenty of distance between him and his Disney years, though, and establishes him as the antihero ideal - charismatic, good-looking, and intense. He gets to wear a James Dean-like leather jacket, sneer, and lick Sandra Bullock. Sitting crouched on a window ledge in a Manhattan hotel, smoking out the window, he gives off the air of every disaffected actor-type caught up in the Hollywood hype machine. But that's just another part.

Girded by years of TV discipline and genuine interest in the craft of acting, Gosling invites no fuss, no coterie of attendants, no room-service lunch, and no bad-boy attitude. The talk is of the two films that haven't hit theaters yet, and a just-completed project that he thinks is destined for the festival circuit before getting a national release. His being humble comes from experience. When Gosling landed his first starring role, as a neo-Nazi skinhead in Henry Bean's "The Believer," he thought he had made it. Before that film was even edited, he was shooting another independent film, "The Slaughter Rule," which went into production on his 21st birthday. He started on "Murder by Numbers" right after "The Believer" won the grand prize at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, beating out "In the Bedroom" and "Memento."

After Sundance, it looked as though Gosling were going to make a huge splash, like the next-generation Edward Norton who just appears on the scene one day with an incredible performance and is ready to become a member of the club. Instead he has led a quieter life, carefully selecting scripts and auditioning for roles, rather than being called and offered roles in big movies. "The Believer" was typical - and Gosling says will remain typical - of the kind of roles he chooses, which so far have included three sociopaths and a troubled teen on the edge of violence. "I never really looked at the murder aspect, I always saw something beautiful in each one," he says. "Some movies are sweet just to be sweet. I wouldn't make a movie that was bleak just to be bleak. I just like these movies, and I want to make movies that I like to go see." In "The Believer," which premiered on Showtime in March and will get a limited theatrical run next month, Gosling gives a captivating performance as a Jewish boy who turns on his own people. He is both menacing and vulnerable. Distributors shied away from the film because of its subject matter, and its initial September airdate was postponed because of terrorism. "I had never read anything like it, or been exposed to anything like it," Gosling says. He was not sent a script directly, but got one through a friend who was auditioning. At the time, Gosling was living in Los Angeles and wasn't working, and hadn't been working for two years except for a small part in "Remember the Titans."

His last kiddie gig, the Fox series "Young Hercules," which was filmed in New Zealand, ended right after he turned 18. He didn't have an agent, and so he couldn't even have a proper audition. He had to go in over a lunch break and try to impress the director and producers. "I wasn't in a place where I could audition for something like that, and I wasn't given scripts like that," he says. "It was really difficult, but it's difficult for everyone. My rec ord didn't reflect the kinds of things I wanted to do."

In "The Slaughter Rule," which was in competition at Sundance in 2002 but has yet to find a distributor, he plays a troubled Montana teenager who loses his father and falls into a complicated relationship with his football coach (played by David Morse). Their interactions teeter on the line between paternalism and pedophilia, with nothing overt ever happening to clear up the ambiguity. "I think it has a difficult structure more than anything," Gosling says, not really sure why the film hasn't found a path to theaters yet. "I thought it was beautiful. It's about a boy who stays, and in most films they leave. I also thought it was just interesting that it was about the idea of what makes a man and how men relate to each other. You haven't really seen that a lot in film. I like the homosexual undertones, too. I just felt like the two characters needed each other, whether that's in a sexual way or not, I don't know."

For the most part, Gosling's experience on the film was of being cold, toughing it out when it was minus 20 degrees and trying to take it like a local. He wasn't about to be pampered more than the other guys filling out the football team. "The thing we said to him most during the shoot was 'Put on a hat,' " says Andrew Smith, who co-directed the film with his twin brother, Alex. Gosling eventually appreciated the cold's artistic merit. He says, "There's one scene where I pick up David Morse and put his arm over his shoulder and it gets slow - that wasn't supposed to be like that. The camera froze, then sped up, and it was this perfect moment." With the project he just finished filming, "The United States of Leland," Gosling thinks he has found a home with first-time director Matthew Hoge. "We're signing a contract together where we're not going to make movies with anyone else but each other," he says. Far from being disheartened by the independent film scene, given the fate of his first two big movies - and the converse ease of his first studio film with an experienced director - Gosling plans to take a bigger part in the production of the movies he is in.

With Hoge, that will probably work out to be something like an actor/director production company like Kevin Spacey's Trigger Street, which happens to have produced "The United States of Leland." "That's the kind of thing that really discouraged me - to make the kind of movies I thought we were making, and then they wouldn't come out," Gosling says. "But I did learn that you've got to hope for the best and just do it."

- Beth Pinsker