EXCLUSIVE: Ryan Gosling Talks Prepping for The Gray Man
Ryan Gosling takes on the role of the elusive “Gray Man” in the Russo Brothers’ new film, The Gray Man. To celebrate the movie, we got the chance to hear from the actor about his role in the new movie.
Filming The Gray Man required a lot from you both physically and mentally, can you talk about the training that went into making this movie?
“There was, as you can imagine, a lot of training for the film. But I had an incredible amount of help. There was an amazing stunt team. At first, they sort of went through all these different styles of martial arts and sort of tried to curate it for you and the character. Then we had this amazing advisor named Chili Palmer, who’s an ex-Delta Force member. I tried to just sort of join myself at the hip with him. He had all these, you know, amazing tactical advice, but also these really amazing ideas.”
Like what?
“Like, you know, you should always have skittles on you. You know? Or, if you’re gonna go to sleep, tie your shoelace to the door ‘cause if someone comes in, you’ll know. All these little details which are things that were not in the script, were things you could only learn from experience, that I thought that really made the film special and added this sort of special sauce to it. So, we had a lot of help.”
You also did a ton of running in the movie!
“Lotta running. I would go to back to pre-movie me and tell him to work on his cardio. I didn’t expect all the Prague running.”
Your character has a number of comedic moments and a lot of intense moments, how do you balance that as an actor?
“You prepare differently. It depends on the filmmakers. The Russos have a really cool process, one I’ve never done before, where at the beginning of the film, we sat with all of the department heads, and they put the script up on a big screen, and everybody starts talking about it as they work through it. And at first, it makes it not precious and very collaborative. It really gets you on the same page, literally. You know what movie you’re making. And it just became clear that we were kind of shooting for the stuff that I grew up loving in the ’80s and ’90s that had a kind of sense of humor about itself.
It also helps because, you know, it’s not often that you find yourself, like, falling through a trap door and end up in a well in some guy’s Czechoslovakian apartment. So, the fact that you can comment on that, you know, that the Russos sort of open it up, that you can sort of say in the movie, ‘Okay, this is, this was unexpected,’ it sort of helps. And it gives you a gear in the movie that you don’t have in a lot of other films. This was kind of a unique process in that way, but I really enjoyed it.”
The Gray Man is now streaming on Netflix and in select theaters.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Photos credit: Paul Abell/Netflix © 2022