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Ryan Gosling doesn’t seem fazed by the success of Barbie, but Mark Ronson, who helmed the film’s music, confirmed that the actor has found the response to his song “I’m Just Ken” “so surreal.”
Speaking during an event about the music of Greta Gerwig‘s hit movie, Ronson described how Gosling has felt about the chart-topping single.
“He feels like someone who doesn’t get caught up in the hype from the little bit I now know about him from hanging,” Ronson said. “I would just send him these stats sometimes. Not every stat that we share, like ‘We just hit 750, we’ve been played on this thing.’ But all the important ones, like ‘Dude, your song just charted on the Hot 100’ or ‘You’re the No. 3 song on the Billboard Rock Tracks.’ Just things that I thought he would dig. And he would be like ‘This is so surreal. I don’t even know what to tell you.’”
Ronson added of Gosling, “He’s a real musician. He loves music. I think he was really touched by that. And Slash played on it. So there’s been certain things where he’s been really excited about [it].”
“I’m Just Ken” quickly became a breakout moment of Barbie. Gerwig told Rolling Stone earlier this summer that it wasn’t inevitable that Gosling would sing the ballad, penned by Ronson and Andrew Wyatt.
“He has a beautiful voice, and he’s a beautiful dancer,” Gerwig said. “We kind of got there organically. I think if I had said, ‘I want you to sing and dance in this movie,’ he would not have necessarily done that for me. But it was kind of that thing of boiling a lobster. I think by the time he was singing and dancing, he didn’t even totally know how we had gotten there.”
She added, “Because I was born in ’83 and going to movies in the Nineties, I wanted to create a moment that felt like those movies from the Nineties, when they had soundtracks to movies that ended up at Costco.”
The song landed on Billboard Hot 100 in its first week at No. 87, marking Gosling’s first appearance on the Hot 100. Last month, Warner Bros. shared a behind-the-scenes video clip from the making of the song, which shows the actor undergoing the most unserious transformation of his career while Gerwig watches along starry-eyed.
“You really fall in love with this hapless, but immediately sympathetic figure,” Ronson previously toldVanity Fairabout Gosling’s Ken. “I instantly had this idea for this lyric: ‘I’m just Ken / Anywhere else I’d be a 10.’ It just seemed funny. It felt a little bit emo, like, this poor guy. He’s so hot, but can’t get the time of day.”
