The tale has been floating around movie sets and message boards like a bit of industry lore for nearly 20 years. An ambitious young actor believes his role needs to be heavier. He then consumes food. Instead, he consumes glass after glass of melted pints of Häagen-Dazs until the weight starts to build up. By most accounts, sixty pounds. Then he transforms and appears on set, only to be sent home. The main details of this anecdote have remained consistent for sixteen years, despite the fact that it sounds too tidy to be completely true.
Ryan Gosling was the actor. The Lovely Bones was the movie. Until recently, Gosling’s own account of the events was the only one available. In 2010, he told The Hollywood Reporter that he had been fired and was, in his own dry words, “fat and unemployed.” His framing of it has a certain charming self-deprecating quality. At the age of 26, he was still years away from his current position as a leading man. The wound was obviously so recent that it felt safer to laugh than to complain.
The ice cream isn’t what makes the whole thing intriguing. It’s the conflict beneath it. Gosling has stated that he honestly thought Jack Salmon, a suburban father devastated by the death of his daughter, ought to weigh about 210 pounds. That’s not how Jackson perceived the character. This is where things get a little murky because, prior to Gosling starting to eat dessert for breakfast, no one seemed to notice the mismatch. It’s a conversation failure, not an acting one.
At Cannes this month, 64-year-old Peter Jackson, who recently received a Palme d’Or, finally spoke about it. He was cautious, almost defensive. He declined to give names, referring to casting choices as “a personal, private thing.” Then he made a statement that really resonated with me: whenever a director recasts an actor, it’s actually the director’s fault because the casting was incorrect in the first place. The line is generous. Too generous, perhaps. However, Jackson centered the entire episode on chemistry, which is the difficult-to-define process by which an actor either blends into a narrative or doesn’t.
There are two ways to read that. It’s either a cautious man avoiding the awkward details of a young actor who arrived physically unrecognizable, or it’s a gracious elder statesman shifting the blame to a respected colleague. Most likely both. Jackson commended Gosling as an outstanding actor, characterizing film as a complex combination of communication, which is both accurate and the kind of thing you say when you’d prefer not to reconsider a 2007 choice.
The role went to Mark Wahlberg. Years later, Saoirse Ronan described the firing as “sad” but understandable. For his part, Gosling had success with Barbie, Drive, and a few Oscar nominations. The melted-ice-cream phase now reads more like the reckless conviction of someone who hasn’t yet learned to hedge his bets than as a warning story.
It’s difficult to avoid seeing a hint of humanity in everything. Years later, a director still feels the need to lessen the impact of a child who had such faith in a role that he had reshaped his own body for it.