‘We have no connection whatsoever’: Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe on The Nice Guys

Ryan Gosling is a nice guy who just can’t win.

That’s where his inept private eye, Holland March, in The Nice Guys stands, anyway. Gosling stars in the 1970s-era buddy action comedy with Russell Crowe, who plays a tough debt collector named Jackson Healy. Together, the two fumble their way through Los Angeles on the hunt for a woman connected to the death of a famous porn star (all while failing to impress March’s trailing young daughter, played by Angourie Rice, who dubs him “the world’s worst detective”).

The Nice Guys appealed to Gosling, 35, because it reminds him of the slapstick comedies he grew up on. “My parents were too cheap to buy a Blockbuster membership,” he quips, “so they just took us to the library where the movies were free and all the library had were Bible movies and Abbott and Costello movies, so I watched all of those.”

In the film, Gosling’s March, a bumbling single father more lucky than skilled, forms an unholy alliance with Healy, a decidedly more grizzled competitor – who, coincidentally, has just cracked a few of his own bones over a client.

“To me it had to be Russell,” says Gosling of his co-star. “That’s how I read it, and that’s how I kind of fell in love with it, because the idea of him in that role was so funny.”

Though an unlikely pairing – Crowe, 52, is best known for serious dramas, while Gosling has dramedies like The Big Short and Crazy, Stupid, Love under his belt, the two prove to be grin-inducing onscreen.