Ryan Gosling’s Most Iconic Movies

There's a Ryan Gosling for every era of your life. He was brooding kid who barely spoke in Drive, then a devastatingly earnest romantic in The Notebook. He made us feel things during La La Land that we didn’t fully understand till we grew up. And then Ken — glorious, absurd, deeply committed Ken — who made Barbie something no one predicted a Ryan Gosling movie could be: a whole cultural event.

Now he's done it again, and this time he's done it alone, light-years from Earth, in a spacesuit, befriending an alien he names Rocky. Project Hail Mary — directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and written by Drew Goddard — follows Ryland Grace, a man who wakes up on an interstellar spacecraft with no memory of how he got there. It's a solo act, essentially, that gave Amazon MGM the biggest debut it has ever had.

Ryan Gosling Iconic Movies

So with Gosling back at the top of the world — or rather, somewhere far beyond it — we went back to the beginning. Here are all the Gosling movies we love and cherish and will continue to do so till the end of our time.

Drive (2011)

This movie has about 100 lines of dialogue, so maybe its not for those who have the patience level of a toothpick and want everything to be fast-paced. And yet, it is Gosling’s greatest performances of the century so far. Refn's neon-lit LA fairy tale works entirely because Gosling grasped something most actors never do: that stillness is louder than anything else. The Driver doesn't explain, he just watches and waits and then acts.

Blue Valentine (2010)

Cianfrance's film cuts between Dean and Cindy falling in love and the same two people destroying each other years later, and the effect is like watching a car crash you cannot look away from and cannot stop. Gosling and Michelle Williams are so good together that the film doesn't feel like fiction at all.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Villeneuve built a cathedral — cold, enormous, lit like a dying planet — and needed someone who could stand at the centre of it without it swallowing them whole. Gosling, playing a replicant cop slowly uncovering the question of whether his own memories are real, was the only person for the job. It is not a warm film. It is not supposed to be, but it’s worth it.

La La Land (2016)

In this movie, Gosling plays that specific, complicated selfishness with so much tenderness that you root for Sebastian even while clocking exactly what he's doing. The jazz obsession, the failing piano bar, the stubborn romanticism — all of it adds up to one of his most fully realised characters. And the ending, which broke hearts and rewired how people talk about compromise and dreams, only lands the way it does because Gosling played the whole thing so quietly, so honestly, that when it finally hits, it hits like a door closing.

The Gray Man (2022)

The Russo Brothers built a globe-trotting, hard-hitting action machine and put Gosling at the wheel, and he is magnetic in it. Trust me, I’ve watched this movie enough times as a guilty pleasure and I have no regrets. Meanwhile, Chris Evans plays villain like he was born to chew scenery in a mustache, and the two of them together have a push-pull energy that crackles.

The Big Short (2015)

Gosling plays Jared Vennett, a banker so pleased with himself he periodically turns to address you directly, like the film is his TED talk. It's a smart, funny performance in a film that belongs to everyone else — Bale going full method with a glass eye and a drum kit, Carell being quietly devastating, Pitt somehow making food paranoia compelling. Gosling is the host at a party he didn't throw, and he was a damn good entertaining one.

The Fall Guy (2024)

Colt Seavers is Gosling at his most openly charming, and so fun to watch on screen in this one. Him singing to Taylor Swift in the car is probably my favourite Gosling scenes of ALL time. The action sequences are jaw-dropping precisely because they're real, and Gosling throws himself into all of it without ever losing the comic timing or the romantic chemistry with Emily Blunt. It's one of those Friday night watches where you don't want to use too much of your brain.

First Man (2018)

Chazelle asked Gosling to play the most emotionally sealed man in American history and Gosling delivered exactly that: a wall with eyes. This is a performance of grief so compressed it has nowhere to go but into the act of pointing a rocket at the moon. The landing sequence will make you hold your breath.

Barbie (2023)

Nobody expected Ken to be the one. Ken was the bit, the garnish, the joke you laugh at and move on from. And then Gosling walked onto that beach with the blonde hair and the absolute conviction of a man who had never once been told he was secondary, and the whole film tilted on its axis. The mojo dojo casa house. The completely deranged commitment to a character who canonically has no inner life. Margot Robbie made Barbie a movie. Ryan Gosling made it a cultural moment you'll be quoting at dinner parties for the next decade!

Half Nelson (2006)

Before he was anyone's internet boyfriend, before the memes, before Ken, Gosling was 26 years old playing a crack-addicted Brooklyn schoolteacher coming apart at the seams and he did it well enough to earn his first Oscar nomination. There's nothing slick about Half Nelson. Just Gosling in a grimy classroom, fully inhabiting a man who is brilliant and broken in equal measure, refusing to let you look away.

The Notebook (2004)

You've seen it. You've cried at it. You've told someone you haven't cried at it. The rain, the geese, the dock — all of it should be too much, and somehow none of it is, because Gosling and Rachel McAdams made chemistry so real on screen that Nicholas Sparks probably can't fully explain it either. He was 23. It was his first major lead and he turned down the role initially. Imagine that universe!

Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011)

Jacob is a fantasy — the impossibly put-together bachelor who somehow has time to rescue sad divorced men at bars — and Gosling plays him with just enough sass of a man in the perfect suit. "Be better than the GAP!" will always be iconic in my head.

The Nice Guys (2016)

Gosling falling off a balcony. Gosling screaming at a corpse. Gosling being catastrophically, spectacularly bad at the one job he has. This is the funniest he has ever been on screen, and it isn't close. Shane Black's sun-rotted 1970s LA noir is grimy and hilarious, and Gosling in it is looser and more willing to embarrass himself than in almost anything else he's made. Russell Crowe beside him is magnificent, and together they are one of the great pairings in recent memory. I’m angry that no sequel was made.