Ryan Gosling has always been an outsider, said Tom Shone in the London Telegraph. Growing up in the small town of Cornwall, Ontario, he struggled to fit in at school, and picked fights with tougher kids in a bid to impress his classmates. It didn’t work. “I lost them all,” says the actor. Deeply lonely, Gosling sank into his own imaginary world. In first grade, he turned up at school with a bag full of steak knives after watching the Sylvester Stallone movie Rambo: First Blood. “[I] threw them at one of the kids in recess.” He was suspended, and soon after his mother started homeschooling him. “I had no pals. None.”
Gosling thought things would change when, at age 12, he moved to Orlando after being cast alongside Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake in The Mickey Mouse Club. He was quickly disheartened. “I wasn’t nearly as talented as some of the other kids.” Relegated to bit parts, he spent his spare time wandering through Disney World alone. “It made a huge impact on me,” Gosling says. “I loved the idea that Walt Disney had this dream and then made it a reality. I want to be that kind of person.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.