Can you feel the Kenergy?
Following the success of the 2023 film “Barbie,” Greta Gerwig recently played coy about the possibility of a Ken movie starring Ryan Gosling.
During an interview on Sunday, “60 Minutes” correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi asked Gerwig if “there ever was a Ken Movie.” Gerwig stated she couldn’t comment on that but wouldn’t totally rule it out.
“I mean, the truth is, you know — I guess we’ll see,” the director said with a smile.
Gerwig had found her perfect Ken early on in creating “Barbie.”
The 41-year-old and her partner — in both work and life — filmmaker Noah Baumbach explained that they alway had Gosling in mind to play Ken while writing the script.
The couple even wrote the 43-year-old actor’s full name next to Ken’s lines in the first draft.
Gerwig and Baumbach had so many ideas for Ken in the final draft that they couldn’t fit them all into the script.
An earlier version of the script saw the “Ken effect” in the real world and included a scene in which Gosling played himself.
“We had way too much material for Ken. We would write, and write, and write,” Gerwig admitted before Baumbach warned her not to “give it away.”
For now, the duo is still basking in the worldwide phenomenon of the “Barbie” movie, which was the highest-grossing film of 2023 and brought in more than a billion dollars worldwide.
Baumbach, however, didn’t know what he was getting into when Gerwig first brought him on board.
“I couldn’t even fathom it,” he recalled. “And Greta wrote these pages…and I thought, ‘I can write this Barbie movie. I totally understand what this is.’”
“Noah immediately understood what I was doing and was like, ‘You know, this is exciting and there’s a movie in here,’” Gerwig gushed.
That’ when the magic started to happen for the writing duo.
“Once we have something that feels more like a script, then we start reading the whole thing out loud,” Gerwig said. “We vetted the language ourselves, so we can hear if there’s a joke that’s repeated or a rhythm that’s off.”
Meanwhile, Gosling is no stranger to speaking about his time as Ken opposite Margot Robbie as Barbie.
When nominated for a Golden Globe, the actor had a very ken-spired response.
“It’s an honor to have your work acknowledged, but for Ken, this is the first time he’s been acknowledged, for anything, EVER!” Gosling said at the time. “And to have it be for supporting Barbie, there is no greater honor. So thanks to the Golden Globes, Ken, whose job definitely isn’t ‘surf,’ has been shredding one giant wave of emotions since he heard the news.”
As for his first impression of playing the beloved love interest of Barbie?
“It was the title page of the script, which said ‘Barbie and Ken,’ but ‘and Ken’ was scratched out,” he told W Magazine in a January interview. “And the next impression was, this is the hardest part I’ll ever play. How do you approach playing a 70-year-old crotchless doll? There’s no research you can do for that. There’s no one you can shadow, no documentaries you can watch, no books written about Ken. You’re on your own.”
