Make Ryan Gosling Ken again
From #notmyken to being #kenough, Ryan Gosling has taken a crotchless doll to unimaginable heights. And now we want more.
I admit it.
I didn’t think Ryan Gosling was a right fit to play Ken.
When the first pictures of him and Margot Robbie rollerblading their way along Venice Beach and clad in neon pink dropped, I thought what most of us thought at the time. Wasn’t he a bit too old for playing a plastic doll no one cared about?
I didn’t seem to be the only one as the #Notmyken hashtag became ubiquitous on social media when the first images of him as Ken started circulating.
When I saw Robbie I didn’t see an actress in character playing a plastic doll. I saw my Barbies. The ressemblance was uncanny. And in fact she goes on to play Stereotypical Barbie in the film, that is, the Barbie you think of when you think of what Barbie looks like.
Next to Robbie, who is the spitting image of a classic Barbie doll in real-life, Gosling seemed an odd choice. A miscast. There was something so artificial about the whole thing, like the plastic character he was meant to portray.
And yet, as we know, paradoxically Robbie’s performance has received in comparison less praise than that of Gosling.
She was just too perfect for the role and everyone expected her to nail it, which she did. Something the movie acknowledges tongue-in-cheek when Helen Mirren breaks the fourth wall during a key moment in the film when Robbie/Stereotypical Barbie is experiencing an existential crisis that involves questioning not only her purpose but also her beauty. It is then that Mirren’s voice, a sort of omniscient narrator, brings the audience’s attention to the fact that Margot Robbie is perhaps the wrong actress to cast to make a point about being ugly. Or imperfect.
This is one of the things Barbie, and Greta Gerwig by extension, does really well: while its message is deeper than it seem at first glance, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. And that has been the key to its success.
Which leads us to casting Ryan Gosling as Ken, a crotchless plastic doll that it is, let’s be honest, an after-thought in the pink bubble of Barbieland. No one had ever cared about Ken and yet everyone had an opinion on who should play him.
The game was on.
I had several Barbies as a child and so did my sister.
How many Kens did we have?
One to share.
The only reason we bought a Ken was because we already had everything else Barbie could have. We wanted to play with dolls because we could see ourselves reflected in them. Every Barbie embodied something different but they all had long hair, incredible smiles, super colourful clothes and that you could swap and lots of nice complements to style them with.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Barbie wasn’t exactly a doll with inclusive beauty standards, but at least she wasn’t an asexual white male whose hair was an extension of his plasticness. I always thought it was wrong that Ken didn’t have real hair you could comb and I believe that contributed to our only Ken’s rapid demise.
In fact, I can’t remember many occasions in which our single Ken, once acquired, had a relevant role in the dynamics my sister’s Barbies and mine engaged in. They had places to be, tons of dresses to wear, and, most importantly, long, luscious fake manes to style. Ken didn’t seem to be the right companion for any of those activities, so he was quickly dismissed and forgotten.
Besides he always wore the same clothes, which was terribly boring and killed the mood every time our Barbies had special occasions and needed their partner to look the part. Our Barbies were Hayley Bieber. Our Ken was just Ken.
We then thought of asking for another Ken as a Christmas present. That way we could have a different set of clothes. Because this was the other issue with Ken: there was no incentive whatsoever in buying him. He didn’t have any accessories other that whatever he came with.
When the time came to go back to the local toy shop around Christmas my sister and I realised that there was only one model of Ken on offer. The one we already had. In a small town of 7,000 people where kids get toys strictly for Christmas and birthdays you get to develop a taste for what sells quickly and stock accordingly and Kens weren’t flying off the shelves.
I bet the owner of the shop only had these two in stock in case someone, for whatever strange reason, wanted a Ken. I know what happened to ours -he was eventually sent to exile in the unused toys box-, but I wonder what may have happed to his companion as he was still around the other times we came back to the shop, perfectly still in his shiny box with an unfaltering smile. Perhaps it’s still there, waiting and smiling.
Ryan Gosling was probably well aware of Ken’s lack of relevance as his own daughters didn’t care much for playing with him.
Why would then anyone go to the extent of making a movie with Ken when he only exists as an appendix of Barbie? Why should he as an actor care about playing a character that seemed so irrelevant?
That’s when fate intervened and put on Gosling’s path the ultimate sign that he was the chosen one: as he was reading the script for Barbie, he found a Ken lying down in his backyard next to a squashed lemon.
In that moment he knew he had to bring dignity to a toy that had been systematically discarded and taken for granted around the world since its creation. He’d bring justice to all Kens, including the abandoned one at my local toy store.
Gosling said in an interview that when he saw that poor Ken in his backyard he took a picture that he sent it to Greta Gerwig and told her “I shall be your Ken.”
And what a good job at Kenning he’s done.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s take a step back and recap.
As I said at the beginning, I wasn’t, not even in the slightlest, a Ryan Gosling fan at the time the first Barbie stills made it to the press.
I was so uninterested in him that even when we hosted a work event in April 2023 at the Outernet, next door to an event he was attending at the same time our event started, I thought that it was very unfortunate as security was turning down our guests thinking they were trying to sneak into his event. I wasn’t happy when next day I saw a few emails from people I had personally invited saying they had come but couldn’t get it.
And shortly afterwards the Barbie PR and global marketing campaign machine was set in motion.
I couldn’t escape its long-reaching tentacles so I finally gave up and considered watching Barbie. I was convinced it’d be a silly movie -a movie about a plastic doll, seriously?- but I had seen Margot Robbie stellar performance in I, Tonya and the press interviews were genuinely fun to watch so I was confused.
I needed a second opinion so I asked my trusted friend Netflix and it gave me answers in the form of two films: Little Women by Greta Gerwig and Drive with Ryan Gosling.
I watched both the same weekend and the verdict was that Greta Gerwig’s directing style was totally up my street. I had read Little Women years ago and Gerwig brought something so beautiful to the story that I was sure she would do a great job with Barbie. As for Ryan Gosling I was quite in awe of his role in Drive. That scene when he is in the elevator is quite something. I remember being very intrigued and really curious to see him play Ken.
Long story short: I’ve watched Barbie four times.
Three at the cinema one at home. The first time I didn’t know what to make of it. I had enjoyed it, sort of, but the celebrated speech by America Ferrera had put me off a bit as it was Feminism 101. Then I thought that at some point every woman makes that realisation and tells herself those words, so the fact that I had already heard them for years didn’t mean they weren’t new for so many other women.
However, the one single scene that left me speechless and convinced me to go back to the cinema was the performance of “I’m Just Ken”. I was completely blown-away by what was happening on screen and couldn’t believe such musical excess, absurdist pastel fantasy was so incredibly perfect.
I was transfixed and realised that I couldn’t stop smiling. What kind of miracle had I just witnessed? That’s when I converted to Ryan Gosling’s craft.
When I went to watch Barbie for a second time less than a week later, I already knew by heart the lyrics to “I’m just Ken.” I felt every word, every emotion, every thought that must have crossed Gosling’s mind when performing that number. I left the cinema even more excited than the first time. In a couple of days I was back for round three because this was such an amazing sequence from beginning to end and a very clever way to mark a pivotal point in the story and in Ken’s development arc.
The Kens battle and Gosling’s subsequent musical number fit like a glove in the narrative arc of the movie. Not only cinematically but also to reinforce its core message: this is a movie about being who you want to be, without having to conform to sterotypes or the role you have been conditioned to perform. And that’s enough.
Barbie embarks on a journey that starts with her as an independent doll with a perfect life that is well defined which she starts questioning. Ken, on the other hand, is just there in the background, existing only because Barbie does. We don’t even know where he lives or what he does exactly. In fact he may as well be homeless at least until he takes over the Dreamhouse and transforms it into his Mojo Dojo Casa House.
Ken is a side dish, not even dessert which everyone loves and makes space for, but a completely optional order. His existence is shaped around that of Barbie. What she does, he does. What she wans, he wants. What she doesn’t want, he accepts. In Barbieland he’s a supporting character whose purpose is never something he has the autonomy to decide on his own.
And that is again another strength of the movie and of the nuanced performance by Gosling: He never ridicules Ken, never makes us think of the character as a parody despite it’d be easy to mock him and his many insecurities, but Gosling never crosses that line, not even when Ken’s fragility is openly revealed. Ken has feelings that he’s been hiding because he doesn’t know he can have them, let alone what to do with them.
The patriarchy and his male-driven agenda seem to give Ken a new sense of direction in a world where he feels irrelevant. This is what he can do, this is who he should be, this is how you make others respect you. Or is it?
Like Barbie, Ken finds himself immersed in an unexpected existential crisis that catapults him from leading a passive existence to becoming a leader of other Kens who believe that happiness and freedom, along with a sense of purpose, will be found once they all embrace The Godfather, mansplaining, horse worshipping and convince all Barbies to satisfy their every need.
But are Kens happier now or just conforming to a different dictate of what they are expected to be and do as male dolls? Isn’t this just another yolk they are putting themselves under?
This is yet again another master stroke of Barbie that gives Ken a reason to explore who he really is within and eventually leads to his self-acceptance awakeing, bringing together all the contradictory feelings he’s experiencing through “I’m Just Ken.”
It could have been very easy, and safer, to just make a movie about Barbie, no one would have questioned the lack of Ken, but that would have been a missed opportunity to tell a bigger story and shine a light on why oppression and submission are never the roads that lead to equality.
How do you convey those ideas in a movie that is, let’s not forget it, fundamentally about plastic dolls?
The answer is the same as with every other movie: by making the audience care about the troubles and tribulations of the characters and connect with them emotionally. And yes, ridicule is a fine line that is never far from being crossed in Barbie, but no one oversteps the mark because the cast, without exception, was committed to embracing their characters wholeheartedly without any trace of judgement.
And here’s when Ryan Gosling works his magic and turns Ken into someone you end up cheering for and deeply caring about by the time the 100 minutes of pink extravaganza that is Barbie are over.
It’s Gosling’s performance which has captured audiences precisely because things were against him both as an actor (#notmyken, he’s too old) and as a character (the abandoned Ken next to a squashed lemon is just one example). That’s why Gosling is the unexpected star of Barbie: he makes people really see Ken for the first time, a remarkable achievement no one had managed before him.
Those who argued Barbie had failed in his feminist propaganda when Gosling started receiving accolades left, right and centre forgot that what Margot Robbie as producer and Greta Gerwig as director set out to do with Barbie was bigger than the sum of its individual parts.
They wanted to launch a specific message: there is no Barbie without Ken and there is no Ken without Barbie, and both deserve to follow their own path, free from any expectations, including those others have set for them as well as the ones they have set for each other. This is why Barbie is a truly feminist movie: it wants equality for all, not just some.
And that’s what Gosling as an actor understood and embodied perfectly well. On screen as a character and off screen as a man, as shown by his reaction to Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie not being nominated for an Oscar in their respective categories:
“There is no Ken without Barbie, and there is no ‘Barbie’ movie without Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, the two people most responsible for this history-making, globally-celebrated film,” Gosling said when the Oscar nominations were revealed.
A reaction he didn’t hesitate to re-enact in the teaser trailer for the Oscars.
Watching Gosling do PR interviews to promote Barbie was a cultural highligh of 2023.
The man was clearly having the time of his life and it showed. While never taking himself too seriously he did commit to being Ken and channeling the character’s essence, or Kenergy (a term coined by Gosling) whenever the opportunity arosed. Likewise, he never failed to show his respect and admiration for the world Gerwig and Robbie had created, their vision and their contagious enthusiasm for the project.
Ryan Gosling’s commitment to Ken, however, wasn’t limited to playing Ken on the film and at PR interviews.
Shortly before Christmas he and Mark Ronson launched a holiday version of “I’m Just Ken”, which in my humble opinion is even better than the original, and you can tell Gosling is having a blast singing the Ken of it.
In another interview before the nominations for the Oscars were announced, Gosling is asked whether he’d like to perform at the awards ceremony.
He confesses he hasn’t considered that possibility, but his nervous laughter gives him away and you can tell he is probably playing that scene on his head and doesn’t mind taking Ken’s anthem to new heights.
When “I’m Just Ken” won the award for Best Original Song at the 29th Critics’ Choice Awards in January, Ryan Gosling’s reaction went viral.
At that point many of us were crossing our fingers and hoping to see him sing live the 80s inspired power-rock ballad at the Oscars. Meanwhile he seemed to be thinking: “Wasn’t the point of Barbie to be about Barbie and not Ken? Why was this song winning? Did this mean I would have to perform at the Oscars?”
And while Gosling was so shocked that he forgot to go on stage to receive the Award at the Critics’ Choice event as performer along with composers Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, Ronson made sure to credit him for making audiences fall in love with the song.
Ronson also explained in an interview that reading Barbie’s script and bouncing off ideas with director Greta Gerwig and his friend Andrew Wyatt is what created the foundations to the track, which was originally a 2’30m song.
However, Gerwig loved it so much that she asked Ronson and Wyatt to extend the song as she wanted a full musical sequence with a big ballet number. Gerwig even fought to keep the sequence in the movie when she was asked, presumably by the studio, whether it was necessary to include it as it could lead to disaster. The fact that Gerwig committed to keep it is testament to her faith in Gosling’s ability to carry it away.
And then it happened.
Barbenheimer has been the unexpected cinematic phenomeon of 2023.
Beyond their independent achivements, these two films have sent a very important message. It is Barbie and it is Oppenheimer and telling stories that get people excited to go to the cinema benefits everyone. As does taking seriously giving life to characters, no matter how crazy, unrelatable, or silly they seem to be. This is where the true craft of a good actor shows.
Ryan Gosling and Cillian Murphy have given brilliant performances in two very different roles and movies. The black and pink of cinema. However, what they both have in common, aside from being great actors, is that they don’t judge the characters they play and that results in extraordinary commitment to their roles. And audiences can tell. And so can critics.
That’s why no one who had seen Barbie was surprised when nominations started rolling for Gosling, first for the Golden Globes, then for the Oscars. And the cherry on the top was that “I’m Just Ken” also was nominated in the Best Original Song category.
While odds were never in Gosling’s favour -the competition was very tough and there have been amazing performances this year- it didn’t matter.
This was a big pat on the back for Gosling for a job extremely well done performing not only a plastic doll no one gave a flying shit about before he infused life into him, but also singing and dancing his transformation from second-best into lead character of his own life with great pathos and not a step out of synch in an impressive over-the-top sequence with a choreographic number that lasts, from beginning to end, 11 minutes.
Again a very slippery slope into ridicule that Gosling avoided and transformed into an opportunity to show the real Ken behind the blonde fragility and the great actor he is. Something no one could have predicted from those Venice Beach snaps and which makes even more remarkable Gosling’s achievement.
While Oppenheimer may have dominated yesterday’s Oscars ceremony, with Cillian Murphy taking home a hugely deserved Best Actor award, it was Ryan Gosling’s mind-blowing live performance of “I’m Just Ken” what sent people in that theatre in a musical catharsis as they sang -probably not for the first time, surely not for the last- a song about the hopes and dreams of a toy no one’d cared about until Gosling had his epiphany and sent that picture to Greta Gerwig accepting his fate.
#Notmyken was a distant memory yesterday night, when Gosling was Ken once again.
Only him could take the character to such great heights and lead him towards being self-confident and accepting himself for being, well, just Ken. And that’s enough.
It was therefore fitting that with the newfound confidence that Gosling had instilled in him, Ken took centre stage yesterday evening at the Oscars and dazzled everyone.
He was joined by Slush and Wolfang Van Halen, as well as 65 other Kens for a performance that paid homage to Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend and which was every bit as extraordinary, heartfelt and playful as Gosling’s rendition of a horse-adoring, crotchless plastic doll. Gosling went into full Kenergy mode and everyone in that room had no option but to follow him.
As Margot Robbie said at the end of Barbie, maybe it is Barbie and maybe it is Ken. And right now the world is ready to see where Gosling could take Ken next.
The Oscars, and one movie, are not kenough.
Abroad is an independent publication about identity and belonging, living in between cultures and languages, the love of books, music, films, creativity, life in London, and being human in the age of artificial intelligence.
I absolutely loved Ryan Gosling as Ken. I love Ryan Gosling in general (The Place Beyond the Pines is genius and La La Land is one of my favourite films) but as you say, he took Ken to a whole new level. I love Ken's character arch in the film, how by the end he was on a path to figuring out who he was as himself, not just Barbie's sidekick. And that performance at the Oscars? No, I have not watched it over a thousand times. Not at all. At all...
I totally agree, this was the least expected phenomenon to rise out from Barbie. But omg, it only makes giving the Oscar to Eilish for the song no one remembers, even more of a snub 🙄 No one would remember it moving on but the Diamonds-inspired performance is there for the ages. Also, what a brilliant idea to go off of another "empty-headed", pink-clad blonde's number 💕