Ryan Gosling Talks The Nice Guys and Working With Russell Crowe

The Nice Guys wasn’t originally intended to be as funny of a movie as it turned out to be, but when writer/director Shane Black and writer Anthony Bagarozzi saw the chemistry between stars Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling, more humor got added.  So much so, that it turned out to be a great comedy/buddy caper in the same vein as Black’s script for Lethal Weapon. 

“I just want to say that there is a giant, talking bee in this, so I can’t take full responsibility for the comedy element, and I don’t know how serious and hard-boiled it was meant to be, but I read it and I thought, ‘There’s a great opportunity here for a lot of physical comedy,'” Gosling said. “Obviously, everyone reads a script differently, and I was a little nervous going into it because I didn’t know how Russell Crowe envisioned the film.”

Set in Los Angeles in the 1970s, The Nice Guys is the story of down-on-his-luck private eye Holland March (Gosling), who teams up with enforcer Jackson Healy (Crowe) to solve a missing persons case. Of course, it turns out to be so much more than that with a huge conspiracy thrown in that puts their lives in danger.

Parade.com caught up with Gosling at a roundtable to promote The Nice Guys and got the chance to talk to him about his character, working with Crowe, the father/daughter relationship in the film, and more.

How would you describe your character?

He’s a schmuck. I heard that word more than any other word on set every day. They almost stopped saying, “Cut,” and they would just say, “What a schmuck,” and I knew the scene was over. 

Talk about your first day working with Russell Crowe?

Our first day working together was the bathroom stall scene, so I went to set early to try and work out this door thing. I was working it out, and I thought I was alone, but I smelled smoke and I looked behind the door and it’s Russell. He’s smoking and watching me, and he very seriously says, “I think if you hit the door with the other leg, it will back bounce farther.” We immediately were having the most serious conversation about the dumbest thing ever, and I knew this was going to be fine and it would be fun.

The father/daughter relationship in this film is unique and Angourie Rice is wonderful as your daughter. Talk about working with her.

It was less a father/daughter and more of a mother/son situation because she’s already about as mature as I was like a year ago. That was one of those great situations where you don’t know how you’re going to play a certain aspect of your character or a certain part of the storyline, and an actor comes in, and, just because of the virtue of who they are and how they are and how they’re playing their part, it just gives you a part of your character so you know exactly how you’re going to play those scenes. So, I was thrilled to work with her, and I’m sure she’s going to be the boss of all of us pretty soon.

There’s a lot of physical scenes in this, how much of it was you and how much was a stuntman, especially falling over the balcony?

I did most of that. The physical comedy element was a big draw for me. I grew up on those films. It’s something I always wanted to do, so I wanted to make sure that I did all those things, but I did have a great stunt guy. I actually wanted to give him a little bit of a break, too, because he had just come off the set of Fury, where he was impaled by a bayonet by his best friend.

This movie takes place in L.A. Is there something about the city that you love?  

I think I spent so much time as a kid dreaming of coming here, wondering what was happening here, and seeing it in movies, reading about it, and then living here, there’s so many facets to it. I’m always amazed by that. I always find a new side of L.A. that I didn’t know existed, and I think I’m always excited when I realize that and then I can find a way to reflect that in a film. For me, it just keeps revealing itself. I wish we could shoot here more because we end up having to try and capture that somewhere else.

The Nice Guys, also starring Matt Bomer, Margaret Qualley, Keith David, Beau Knapp and Kim Basinger, opens in theaters nationwide on May 20.