WOW! Ryan Gosling speaks fluent Russian! Or we dialed the wrong number for his interview
LONDON, ON—When it comes to our greatest stars, the only thing we can expect is that they will always continue to surprise us.
Or else that their representative just didn't give us their proper contact information and so we spoke to a different person. That, too, is always possible.
We were stunned when, during a recent phone interview with Ryan Gosling to promote his new film Blade Runner 2049, the actor displayed a stunning fluency in the Russian language that he has never before revealed to the press. Perhaps the star of the cruise ship high school sitcom Breaker High was doing far more studying in his spare time than his prankster character Sean Hanlon did on the show!
Either that, or it was not Ryan Gosling that we reached via long-distance call and to whom we spoke for what can only be described as a very uncomfortable eight minutes.
But with Hollywood, you never know!
One thing that suggests we definitely may have been speaking to the Ontario-born actor was the number of times he said the very name "Ryan Gosling." He was saying it almost constantly, in fact. That does seem like the type of thing you would say if you were confirming that you were, indeed, Ryan Gosling.
However, it's also the thing you would say if you were vehemently denying that you were Ryan Gosling.
What a chameleon!
Also, he was saying it with an implied question mark at the end, and it was sandwiched in between words that did not sound English at all, and which, even after inquiring about a translation with our news outlet's foreign bureau, we cannot transcribe here, as I do not have the proper characters on my MacBook keyboard. So it seems like he was definitely speaking Russian, or a language like it—not something we would put past the brainy thespian!
We would put it past a Russian native who was not Ryan Gosling even less, though.
The star of such varied projects as Half Nelson (2006), Lars and the Real Girl (2007), and La La Land (2016) has clearly found time to keep his Russian language skills sharp, whenever he originally learned them, which is amazing with a career as busy as his in a non-stop industry. Unless it is a different man to whom we spoke, one whose amount of free time we cannot confirm, though he's probably not in movies. Most people aren't.
On a personal note, this reporter cannot fully express my amazement at the man's talents, nor my full uncertainty regarding whether I was talking to the right guy.
In fact, ordinarily I would not share personal information about a celebrity subject, but… +7 499 677-39-29… is that a Hollywood number? Maybe Vancouver? It does not feel like a Vancouver number, though I know they "do things differently" out west.
Also the ring was more like a honking than a ringing, and I spoke to three different people before Mr. Gosling, all of whom displayed the same facility with Russian. What is going on in Hollywood these days?!
Or Russia.
In conclusion, we thank Mr. Gosling for his time, and encourage you all to see Blade Runner 2049 when it is released in theatres around the world October 6, 2017.
(This is information that I obtained by Googling; Mr. Gosling did not speak about the film, having done what I can only describe as a "yelling laugh" when I mentioned it. Perhaps he remembered the original. Anyway I assume the film will also be released in Russia.)
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