Ryan Gosling’s looks and physique are nothing short of almost as stunning as the figures of Greek mythology: blatantly charming and appealing to the core. The robber of almost everyone’s hearts that he comes across, the 43-year-old Ken has gifted the Hollywood cinema with some equally pleasing works. Yet, in the list of all the masterpieces from Gosling, The Lovely Bones doesn’t rank on any number.
The reason? Because the Barbie actor went a bit too far with his dedication to his role. In fact, so much so that, in the end, he was left “fat and unemployed” after getting fired by the filmmaker and got replaced by Mark Wahlberg instead.
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With his alluring personality, terrific acting chops, and utter dedication to his character, Ryan Gosling is the ultimate package any filmmaker could ever ask for. But that was hardly the case with Peter Jackson, the minds behind The Lovely Bones.
In the movie, The Notebook star was cast for the role of Jack Salmon, the father of two teenage girls, one of whom gets murdered and has the entire storyline circling from her perspective. Thus, to make his role as a broken, grieving father more believable, the actor decided to put on some weight.
And by ‘some’, we mean a whole 60 pounds. For this, he basically drank melted Häagen-Dazs ice cream whenever he felt thirsty. After standing at a whopping 210 pounds, an all-excited Gosling showed up on the sets of the film, ready to get applauded for his dedication.
However, he was instead greeted with a “you look terrible” comment, followed by a “hit the treadmill” command because he looked nothing like what the director had thought of the character to look like. Sharing about the same during one of The Actors Roundtable episodes by THR, he said:
“What it really was, was just a sign of much deeper things: the way that I saw the character vs. the way Peter saw the character. We didn’t talk very much during the preproduction process, which was the problem. It was a huge movie, and there were so many things to deal with, and he couldn’t deal with the actors individually. I just showed up on set, and I had gotten it wrong. Then I was fat and unemployed.”
But everything that happened was all for the better, and even Ryan Gosling himself has come to terms with this fact.
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Although most would be sad to see their utter commitment to their character go down the drain as they get replaced by someone else, that wasn’t the case for Ryan Gosling when he was replaced by Mark Wahlberg for the role of Jack Salmon in The Lovely Bones.
Admitting that it was indeed “creative differences” between him and the director that led to him leaving the film, the La La Land star said:
Continuing, Gosling also admitted how glad he was after leaving the project for reasons all too understandable.
“The weight was just indicative of the deeper misunderstanding about the character. And thank God it did happen because it would have been an awful environment for everyone to work in. It ended up being a good thing. It was like the canary in a coal mine.”
Well, judging from how old he was when he was cast for the role of a grieving “father of two”, i.e. only in his late 20s, Ryan Gosling most certainly dodged a bullet with The Lovely Bones that would have left an inevitable dent in his star-studded career.
