It’s Barbie’s world, and we’re just living in it — Ryan Gosling included. The first image of the Notebook star in Warner Bros.’ upcoming film adaptation of the classic doll franchise has been released, and Gosling looks as shiny as ever as Barbie’s perfect, plastic partner, donning an ‘80s-style denim vest and jeans, completing the look with white-blonde hair and boxers embroidered with his name — because of course.
The new image is only the second we’ve seen from the upcoming film, aside from one of Margot Robbie as the titular Barbie, and this one seems equally as neon and pink as Robbie’s, showing off a world eerily reminiscent of both the plastic playhouses made popular by little girls around the globe and the iconic pink house from 1964’s What a Way to Go!, though Gosling’s Ken seems a little bit more polished and perfect than Gene Kelly’s Pinky Benson.
Barbie recently received a summer 2023 release date, which, while stacking it up as a possible summer blockbuster, also puts it up against Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer — and what a pair that’s set to make. And Barbie’s cast is just as stacked to the gills as Nolan’s wartime epic — currently, the film is set to star Robbie and Gosling as the iconic Barbie and Ken, with Simu Liu, Issa Rae, Alexandra Shipp, Will Ferrell, Hari Nef, Ncuti Gatwa, Michael Cera, Rhea Perlman, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Emerald Fennell, and Rita Arya also starring, among others.
Some of these cast members are said to be playing different versions of Barbie and Ken as well, and with no plot details having been revealed about the film as of yet, we can only imagine what that casting might mean for a film adaptation that’s already quite off the wall, being the first major live-action adaptation of a doll franchise that seems to be going beyond the classic “adapt a fairy tale with Barbie as the lead” formula that created so many animated films in the 2000s. What director Greta Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach have in store is anyone’s guess.
Barbie, also starring Sharon Rooney, Scott Evans, Ana Cruz Kayne, Connor Swindells, and Jamie Demetriou, is set for a summer release on July 21, 2023. Check out the full image of Gosling as Ken below:
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