Russell rolls with the punches
For Ryan Gosling, The Nice Guys is not just a demented twist on Hollywood’s usual buddy film. It’s a full-out action comedy, one that teams him with Academy Award-winner Russell Crowe (Gladiator) in a dynamic departure from the dramatic films that have made him one of Hollywood’s most wanted.
Gosling’s Holland March is a detective in 1977 Los Angeles. March’s ‘‘work’’ means mostly taking money from deluded old ladies.
He’s also a ditsy dad, a boozy widower who is semi-parented by his much more responsible 14-year-old daughter (poised Aussie teen Angourie Rice).
If definitely not a ‘‘nice’’ guy, he’s certainly funny.
That, it turns out, was entirely Gosling’s idea.
‘‘Look, everyone reads a script differently,’’ Gosling, 35, begins.
‘‘I read it as a big opportunity for me to get to explore the physical comedy that I grew up on and love so much. But I didn’t know how that was going to go over. I also didn’t want to ask, because I didn’t want to be told, ‘No’. I just thought it was easier to get forgiveness than permission.’’
His first day filming found him nervous about ‘‘the bathroom scene’’, in which March, sitting in a toilet stall, futilely tries to light a cigarette with a door that won’t close.
‘‘I went early to work on it. I thought I was there alone and suddenly I smelled smoke. I looked and Russell was there smoking, watching me. He says, ‘I think if you kick the door with your other foot, it will bounce further’.
‘‘As I had my pants around my ankles, we immediately started having a very serious conversation about the stupidest thing. I thought, ‘This is going to be OK’.’’
Co-star Crowe calls Gosling ‘‘a genius’’.
‘‘He’s a thinker who loves to examine things. He’ll be talking about the most absurd joke, but with great thought, drawing from the great clowns in the history of cinema. And you can only do that stuff if you have a dancer’s grace.’’
Crowe describes his own character, Jackson Healey, as ‘‘a bottom feeder who has decided that ambition is not such a bad thing’’.
He says he and writer-director Shane Black (Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) had conversations about Healey’s background.
‘‘I didn’t want him as a West Coast guy. I wanted him to be displaced. We decided he spent time most likely in the Navy.
‘‘The brutal aspect is coming from Shane,’’ Crowe, 51, adds. ‘‘Shane wanted those hits to be absolute. You smack the guy? You don’t tap: You bludgeon. That way Jackson gets his job done quicker.’’
A physical actor, Crowe is now 60 pounds lighter than he was during filming.
‘‘Stunt stuff,’’ he enthuses, ‘‘is one of my fortes going back to Gladiator or Romper Stomper. It’s in my DNA and I know it really well.’’
But the film’s mighty – and mightily mean – hand-to-hand fight with Keith David in the midst of a druggy Hollywood Hills bash had a surprise punch.
‘‘Keith actually broke my nose, got me right on the nose with an elbow,’’ Crowe cheerfully says.
‘‘Everybody heard – because they’re all wearing headphones – and they’re freaking out because it’s the middle of the night in a party sequence and there are 250 extras.
‘‘I was a little dizzy and said, ‘Let’s go’. They were, ‘Are you serious?’ Shane Black was like, ‘Oh yeah.’
‘‘Keith, I have great affection for him; I had done The Quick and the Dead with him.
‘‘There’s nothing to say, a little blood and a couple of black eyes the next day, a little racoonish.’’