It Took Ryan Gosling A Full Year To Work Up The Ken-ergy (Sorry) To Do ‘Barbie’

Few have been as enthusiastic about Greta Gerwig’s unlikely — and apparently excellent — movie take on Barbie than Ryan Gosling. He’s called the script, by Gerwig and her partner Noah Baumbach, “the best script I’ve ever read.” He’s freely bandied about the term “Ken-ergy.” But he wasn’t always sure he was on board.

In a new profile of Gerwig by The New York Times (in a bit caught by The AV Club), the paper speaks to Gosling, who confesses he really dragged his feet saying yes to playing the lesser half of the Barbie-Ken duo. In fact, he spent a year before signing up.

“There were times where I was sure I wasn’t doing the film,” Gosling remembered. “I would call my agent and ask who was playing Ken. And they would say, ‘Greta says you are.’”

Obviously he ultimately gave in. As he puts it, “She was just, in the end, more confident that I should play him than I was that I shouldn’t.”

One thing that may have nudged him into accepting is that they solved one crucial problem: Ken needed, as NYT puts it, “an additional beat.” So they gave him one: a dream dance number, with a song that has already dropped. (When asked about caving in, Gerwig shrugged and said, “I like dream ballets, and I like mothers.”)

In fact, despite the star-studded soundtrack, Ken is the only character who gets to break out into a power ballad — a number that features a “Ken-on-Ken beach battle that leads to a Ken-and-Ken dream ballet that ultimately allows Ken to realize that he is ‘Kenough.’”

Will there be still more Ken-related puns in Barbie itself? You can find out on July 21, when you take Tom Cruise’s advice and see it on a double with the super-sexy Oppenheimer.

(Via NYT and The AV Club)