Ryan Gosling stopped by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Thursday night ahead of the July 22 premiere of The Gray Man, but naturally, the subject of one of his other hyped upcoming blockbusters came up. As everyone is pretty much aware at this point, Gosling stars as Ken in Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Barbie movie — to the unending fascination of the internet.
When Fallon pointed out that the first look of Gosling as Ken, in all his spray-tanned, six-packed glory, “broke the internet,” the actor quipped, “the internet has been trying to break me for years.”
“I was surprised how, you know, some people were kind of clutching their pearls about my Ken, as though they ever thought about Ken for a second before this,” Gosling said of the reaction. “They never played with Ken. Nobody plays with Ken, man … He’s an accessory and not even one of the cool ones.”
Gosling went on to explain that when Gerwig had initially contacted him for the role, he did some soul searching to decide if it was right for him.
“Best script I’ve ever read,” he told Fallon. “I walk out into the backyard, and you know where I found Ken, Jimmy? Facedown in themed next to a squished lemon.”
For context, Gosling shares two daughters under the age of 10 with actress Eva Mendes, with whom he has been in a relationship since 2011.
“This is a sign you gotta do this movie,” Fallon quipped. “The utter disrespect!” Gosling added: “I texted it to Greta, and I said, ‘I shall be your Ken. For his story must be told.'”
And his story will be told, on July 21, 2023, when Barbie hits theaters in an already hotly contested showdown against Christopher Nolan’s WW2 biopic Oppenheimer.