Ryan Gosling Shines In The Smart Legal Thriller 'Fracture'

Thursday, 19 April 2007

By Christina Radish   Ryan Gosling at the premiere of "Fracture" held at the Mann Village Theater in Westwood, Calif. on April 11, 2007.  When Ted Crawford (Anthony Hopkins) discovers that his beautiful younger wife, Jennifer (Embeth Davidtz), is having an affair, he plans the perfect murder.  Although she was shot at point blank range, she isn’t dead, and Crawford readily admits to shooting his wife.  Immediately arrested and detained, the seemingly slam-dunk case falls into the lap of hot shot assistant district attorney Willy Beachum (Ryan Gosling), who already has one foot out the door of the District Attorney’s (David Straithairn) office on his way to a lucrative job in high-stakes corporate law.  But, nothing is as simple as it seems, especially when it comes to this case, as Beachum quickly finds out.    Academy Award winner Anthony Hopkins was already cast as Crawford when Ryan Gosling read the script.  Drawn in by the suspense of the story, the 26-year-old Academy Award nominee jumped at the chance to get to work with one of his heroes.    “Anthony is intimidating for different reasons than I thought,” the star of The Notebook tells MediaBlvd Magazine.  “He’s so good.  He’s a really loving, warm guy, and he’s so prolific.  He paints, he’s a composer and he directs.  He never stops.  He sits there, doodling while he’s talking to you, and it’s the most incredible doodle you’ve ever seen.  He’s this creative force, and that’s inspiring and intimidating, at the same time.”     Although his character does grow over the course of the film, playing someone who is smug, arrogant and generally unlikable, was what appealed to the former Mousketeer.  “Willy reminds me of a lot of agents I’ve met, where you don’t really know where they’re coming from.  He’s supposed to be the good guy in the movie, but he’s not really that good.  He’s not bad and, as long as he’d not bad, that’s good enough for him.  Doing the right thing is kind of a pain in the ass.  It’s not in his nature to be heroic, or to be good, or to do the right thing.  He leans more towards the narcissistic, self-serving, selfish side of things.  And, he never really quite changes.  He’s constantly doing the bare minimum.  I found it interesting, in this genre, to have a character like that, who’s not virtuous.”   {quote_top}Once they started filming, Gosling found it particularly difficult not to sit in awe of Hopkins while they were working.  “I did more acting, trying to pretend that I wasn’t enjoying what Anthony was doing.  It’s hard to be in scenes with him, where you’re sitting there and he’s being so good that you just want to watch him, as if he was in a movie, and then you have to remind yourself, ‘No, I’m in this film too.’  I would laugh at stuff he was doing, when he was the bad guy.  I found that really difficult.  Plus, I was taking acting notes at the same time.  I was trying to break down why he’s so great and I thought, if I could be there on set and watch it happen, I’d be able to figure it out.  But, it’s just that he’s great.  There’s no real secret to it.”     Gosling loved the family aspect that Hopkins creates on set.  “A lot of actors, when they make movies, act like it’s their journey that everyone is on the set to facilitate.  On set, everyone is there to help you, so you feel that everyone is there for you.  Tony has this great way of making everyone feel like you’re making a movie together, and that it’s a collaboration.  He’s very inclusive.  He’s not private with his process.  He puts it out on the table and anyone can pick it up and try to work it out, like a Rubik’s Cube.  For me, it was great, at this point in my career, to see somebody work like that.”   Even though Hopkins seems like he would be a very intense, serious actor, Gosling says that quite the opposite is true of him.  “He doesn’t like when people start taking everything so seriously, and I’m certainly a victim of that.  So, if everything got a little too serious, he would start barking like a dog.  When he barks, just like with everything he does in his life, he does it great.  He sounds exactly like a dog.  You could almost tell the breed.”   Since his Best Actor Oscar nomination for his role in Half Nelson, about an inner-city junior high school teacher with a drug habit who forms an unlikely friendship with one of his students after she discovers his secret, Gosling says that the number of opportunities made available to him has definitely grown.  “There are a lot more opportunities now, but with those opportunities comes a certain responsibility to do the most with them.  When you only have one option, when you’re starting out, it’s easy because you take that option.  But, when you have a lot of options, you really have to make sure that the option you choose is going to give you more opportunities, or take you in the direction you want to go.”   {quote_bottom}Up next for Gosling is the unusual film Lars and the Real Girl, about a delusional young guy that strikes up an unconventional relationship with life-size sex doll that he buys off the Internet.  Continuing to work in both big studio and independent films is something that Gosling hopes to continue to do throughout his career.     “I love movies.  I like the thriller genre -- although I don’t think I’ve seen a lot of good ones lately -- and I’ve always wanted to make one.  I couldn’t have had a better partner than Anthony Hopkins.  He’s a master and, to watch a master work, I felt was really important.  And, I like making movies like Half Nelson, and will probably always go back to that, since I think it’s easier to make a better movie when it’s smaller, just because you have less people watching.  You have to feel like you have a good team.  But, I try not to discriminate against budget because there’s so little good material out there that, if I focus myself on one world, I’ll never work.  I have to do the best with what’s out there, no matter if it’s big or small.  And, I have to keep mixing it up and doing things that are very different from each other, or I’ll get too set in my ways.”

 

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