By 
Spare a thought for Leonardo DiCaprio. He wakes up this morning, shuffles to the kitchen and fumbles with the lid of the Kenco jar. Stirring his coffee, he thumbs through his phone. Something starts playing. As he watches, his stirring slows and stops. He looks over to his Oscar cabinet. There’s an empty space next to his Best Actor statuette for The Revenant. Killers of the Flower Moon was meant to fill it. Damn you, Gosling, he thinks. Damn you.
Nope, I’m not even being facetious. Ryan Gosling as Ken opposite Margot Robbie in her peppy, postmodern Barbie could be his defining role. Watch that trailer again. Witness the fringed cowboy shirt as he marches past a doctor to attempt some surgery. Swoon at the smoothness with which he puts on his second pair of sunglasses. Feel the Kenergy.
That moment in the trailer when Ken rocks up at a hospital to do a couple of appendectomies (“Can I talk to a doctor?” “You are talking to a doctor”) has upset some Ken fans, who take a dim view of the unthinking sexism that Gosling’s Ken indulges in. He’s an empty vessel, not a symbol of dumb misogyny, they point out. Others surmise that Ken’s going to hit the real world and fall under the influence of a bunch of dumb misogynists, like if Frankenstein’s monster had escaped the lab table and bolted straight into a thicket of 15-year-old Andrew Tate fans.
Upsetting Barbie fans is not new to Gosling. Margot Robbie is a perfect Barbie. That much was obvious. But for a lot of people it was less obvious that Gosling would work as Ken. When those first pictures of Gosling dropped last summer – bleached hair and denim vest, leaning against a flamingo-pink wall – there was some consternation. At 41, he was apparently too old to convincingly play an ageless doll. There were demands for a Hemsworth to be airdropped in.
“I was surprised, how some people were kind of clutching their pearls about my Ken, as though they ever thought about Ken for a second before this,” Gosling told Jimmy Fallon.
Some people worried he was slumming it. (Yes, slumming it with Noah Baumbach, Gerwig and Robbie – some people have very high expectations of la Goz.) He’s always been the most wryly subversive of Hollywood’s triple-A uber-hunks, always in touch with the indie scene leant into via Lars and the Real Girl and Half Nelson. While Chris Evans was saving humanity and eating shawarma with the Avengers, Gosling was stomping a guy’s head to bits in a lift in Drive. (I’m going to assume that The Gray Man was all Evans’ fault.) When Michael B Jordan was building a juggernaut sports franchise in Creed, Gosling did the cult buddy action comedy The Nice Guys and spent three months learning to play jazz piano for La La Land.
And really, Gosling’s casting always felt like the tipping point at which the idea of Greta Gerwig – indie royalty with exceptional taste – doing a day-glo tie-up with Mattel started to feel like the coup of the century. Gerwig and Barbie has the same dynamic as Gosling and Ken: both smart people who make good choices, sprinkling enough legit-ness on the whole thing to turn it from merely trashy to a kind of pop art statement. (I didn’t want to have to mention The Gray Man again, but The Gray Man is the exception which proves the ‘good choices’ rule in Gosling’s case.)
Gosling’s got uncanny comic timing and a mastery of an empty, airheaded grin, and it’s the raised eyebrow and undertone of irony that has broken Barbie out into being a big summer event.
You get the sense, though, that Gosling is coming at it with a bit more empathy for the poor, smooth-groined tagalong. On Fallon, he reflected that the people who hated his look as Ken probably just hated Ken. “They never played with Ken,” he said. “Nobody plays with Ken, man. He’s an accessory. And not even one of the cool ones.”
He cares about Ken. In that chest still beats the heart of the 10-year-old Mouseketeer who was filmed stagily jazzing through ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah’ by a local news crew. She’s Barbie. He’s just Ken. And if there’s any justice, he’ll be able to jump into the tuxedo that came with Fairytale Groom Ken and take what’s rightfully his come awards season.
