Ryan Gosling’s ‘Fall Guy’ Preparation Looked a Lot Different Than ‘Barbie’

IF YOU TRY to picture Ryan Gosling’s current aesthetic, your mind likely flashes to a bright pink fully unbuttoned shirt, a fresh pair of shades, and bleach-blonde perfectly-styled hair blowing in the wind as he rolls around in a hot-pink convertible. The actor’s success as Ken in the 2023 award-winning Barbie has dominated the conversation for the past several months. Now, his next project is about to hit the big screen—and it’s quite an appearance change.

Fall Guy, from director David Leitch, is a fight-packed, car-rolling, everything-exploding action adventure that follows Gosling’s character Colt Seavers, an ex-stuntman who’s pushed back into his old job when a movie star disappears. As you can imagine, Colt and Ken have very different vibes. In his cover interview with Men’s Health, Gosling explained how prepping for the role of Colt differed from how he prepared for Ken.

“I ate more,” he laughed. “The food in Australia [where the film was shot] is just too good. And also Colt, the character, wasn’t concerned about aesthetics. You know, this was a guy who was a valet [before returning to stuntwork], and one of the big selling points of his job was that he got all the burritos he could eat, so it’s not like he shows up camera ready.”

While the eating habits might have been more lax, the training was a bit more specialized. Instead of learning dancing choreography, he was challenged with fight and stunt choreography. There were a handful of scenes where Gosling had to do his own stunt work, including a fall from a 12-story building (“I think I blacked out for at least nine of those stories,” he told MH), and a fight scene on the Sydney Harbor Bridge. That took some fight choreography training, which includes learning small bits of different types of martial arts.

Gosling did have five different stunt doubles. While they did most of the high-intensity stunt work, it was important for Gosling to do those few occasional falls and fights to gain a deeper connection to his stuntman character.

“So yeah, [training for this role] was different [than Barbie], and it was more fun in a way,” he says.

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