Hollywood's man of the year? Look no further than Ryan Gosling. That, back in February, the Academy overlooked him for his wrenching turn in marital drama Blue Valentine now seems but a distant blip in a year to remember. Three new films - one comedy, one style-heavy thriller, one political drama - look set to cement his blossoming reputation. In a recent poll on movie ticket website Fandango, Gosling was voted best new leading man, grabbing 62 per cent. The next in line was Justin Timberlake, with 18 per cent.
'He's a huge star - he always has been,' says Nicolas Winding Refn, director of Drive, in which Gosling excels as a getaway driver (drawing comparisons with everyone from Robert De Niro to Steve McQueen). 'Few people are born with it. And he's certainly born with it.'
That may be true, but the 30-year-old Canadian has never been at ease with the Hollywood machine. 'For a long period of time he was sort of the reluctant star,' says George Clooney, who casts him as the ambitious press secretary of a Democratic presidential candidate in his new film, The Ides of March.
Indeed, after the success of shameless romance The Notebook in 2004, Gosling ducked the studio fodder on offer, instead playing a man in love with a sex doll in Lars and the Real Girl and a crack-addicted teacher in Half-Nelson. The latter won him an Oscar nomination. 'I started realising there are filmmakers out there who are trying to honour how complicated people really are,' Gosling says when we meet in London's Soho Hotel. 'It's more interesting to play those characters, who are more interesting than heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys.'
There may be other reasons why the Ontario-born Gosling is spooked by fame: he had his first taste of it when he was 12 years old, when he beat 17,000 other hopefuls to become a Mouseketeer on Disney's The Mickey Mouse Club. From there, he went on to Canadian television series Breaker High before heading to New Zealand to play the title role in Young Hercules. 'The director would ask us to deliver a cliffhanger so people would watch the commercials and come back to the episode,' he recalls. 'I thought, 'I don't believe in any of these products enough to be selling them'. I wanted to make movies, where they can't change the channel.'
Bullied in school - one story has it that he threw steak knives at other students - Gosling also saw his parents divorce when he was young. His father, Thomas, a paper mill employee, added to the pressure, pinning his hopes on his young son. 'He wanted to be famous, and thought I could give him a different life,' Gosling says. 'It was terrible. It made me hate it, because it wasn't about me at all, and my happiness. It was about him getting out of this life that he didn't like. It was why I stopped doing things that he could brag about. I wanted to do movies that he couldn't brag about. I think it was a rebellion thing.'