![]() To research the role, Gosling shadowed a history teacher in Brooklyn. As one of his own students enters a seedy, prostitute-filled motel room to hand him a small package, the question of whether anyone can save anyone else in this situation is left open. The teacher he plays in Half Nelson thinks he is struggling to save inner-city teenagers from a life of drug pushing, yet the example he sets is far worse. It's possible that Gosling, intentionally or not, is the most 'Method' of young actors, harnessing the rebellions and contradictions and exclusions of his youth to portray characters who are engaged in battles against themselves. He'd fight with people all the time, never pay attention in class before long, his nickname was 'trouble'. ![]() She's different now, but at the time, it was a part of everything - what they ate, how they thought. 'My mother admits it: She says, you were raised by a religious zealot. 'We were brought up pretty religious,' he recalls. Gosling grew up in a small paper mill town in Canada his family are Mormons, and his father and uncle worked at the mill. Gosling explains: 'Henry loves the dark horse.' ![]() He thought Gosling's own upbringing contained the kinds of complexities that would see him through it. But Believer director Henry Bean eventually agreed to see him in his lunch hour. His role as Young Hercules in the TV series, and as one of the presenters of The Mickey Mouse Club were still very recent memories. Nothing he had done in the past would have suggested he was capable of such a performance. He was helping a friend with his lines, and was so impressed with the script that he begged for an audition himself. When he head-butts someone in slow motion, we see not just fury, but an unmistakable glint of ecstasy in his eyes. That's not quite true: as Danny Balint, Gosling assumes all the articulacy, self-hatred, violence and glee of a truly fearsome young man, and gives Balint more dimensions than you'd care to contemplate. Based on the true story of a Ku Klux Klan member who was revealed by a New York Times reporter to be Jewish, The Believer offers up a central character so beautifully written, Gosling says, 'that you could put any actor in it'. Now that it has been released on DVD it may be more helpful in cementing Gosling's Half Nelson-inspired reputation than it was at its delicate outset. The Believer, which was so controversial that despite winning the Grand Jury Award at Sundance it never had a US cinema release - gave Gosling the role of a lifetime. Gosling is extraordinary - in the first and last of those performances particularly - and virtually unrecognisable from one role to the next. ![]() ![]() In the past six years he has played a Jewish neo-Nazi in The Believer (2001), a homicidal flirt in Murder By Numbers (2002), an imprisoned teenager in The United States of Leland (2003), a handsome lead in the wartime romance The Notebook (2004), and now, in Half Nelson, a putative role model who has lost control of his life. Gosling has a mug locked in a firm embrace, and asks for a steady stream of refills. We are sitting at a corner table in the Cupping Room Cafe in SoHo, where the air is thick with the smell of freshly ground coffee. ![]()
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