The nice guys

Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling are very pleasant chaps.

Words Jane Crowther

Spanky and Mucky-Muck are on press duties. The duo are in adjoining suites at the swish Beverly Hills Hotel in LA on a beautiful spring day in March; one smoking up a storm despite hotel rules, the other opening windows to get ‘the outside in and the inside out’. Yin and yang. They’re here to promote their new movie which sees them as bickering buddies knocking seven bells out of each other and chasing round LA on a mad-cap crime caper. A new cartoon perhaps?

Well, sort of – in the sense that this is probably the most fun you’ve seen heavyweight actors Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe have on screen in a while. And they do whip up a Looney Tunes-esque chemistry together in Shane Black’s darkly comic love letter to seedy ’70s LA, The Nice Guys. Low-rent PI Holland March (Gosling) crosses paths with paid heavy Jackson Healy (Crowe) as they search for a missing girl and stumble into the middle of a porn conspiracy and wide-reaching corruption amid American big business.

And that tangible bond is built on a real-life bromance – as seen with their entertaining banter while presenting at the recent Oscars. So much so that they have nicknames for each other. “I call him Spanky,” smiles Crowe fondly, with a twinkle in his eye, when asked about his co-star. “You probably shouldn’t put that in the article, but he can really make me laugh.” “Mucky-Muck,” ‘Spanky’ nods with a smirk when talking about Crowe, “He has to carry that name around for the rest of his life now...”

So how did we get here? Two actors known for their intensity, commitment and pursuit of veracity relaxing into gleeful physical comedy and tomfoolery? Both, along with producer Joel Silver and writer-director Shane Black, have been, at some point or another, labelled ‘difficult’…

“You’re not talking about really simple people, you’re talking about really complicated people,” shrugs an extremely courteous and loquacious Crowe, sitting at the suite desk as though conducting a job interview and