Ryan Gosling’s character in The Nice Guys may seem like the most incompetent private detective in the world, but then he’ll have a moment where he could rival some of film and the literary world’s private dicks. But Gosling seems to credit his onscreen daughter Holly (Angourie Rice) for his character’s best moments.
“Yeah, he’s pretty terrible,” Gosling said and laughed. “I think his daughter is probably the real detective. I think he’s got good instincts. I love the character.”
Gosling was more than eager to sign to The Nice Guys, largely because it was his chance to work with writer-director Shane Black. “I grew up on Shane Black movies. So, for me, it just really spoke to me as soon as I read it. It’s such a dream as an actor where you get to play somebody that has so many dimensions to them and is so fallible but he’s so redeemable in really small ways,” Gosling said.
As is clear in The Nice Guys trailer, the film is much more than a crime comedy. There are family elements (between Gosling’s character and his daughter), a love letter to old(er) Los Angeles (it takes place in the 70s) and an old fashioned buddy picture featuring pitch perfect chemistry between Gosling and his co-star Russell Crowe.
“You can tell that it had taken a long time to write. They’ve been working on this for a long time. It had been in a lot of different incarnations with different people involved. There was a TV show at one point, and then it was a film. It was not set in the ‘70s for a while. All of those versions just bolstered it, strengthened it, and only the strongest ideas survived,” Gosling said. “I saw about 15 minutes of it with an audience the other day. Afterwards, people were saying that they were surprised they were laughing so much but they also found themselves really emotionally invested as well. So it was nice to hear.”
Crowe and Gosling are private eyes, who are tapped to find a missing porn star. The truth, when it is uncovered, will reach to the highest levels of power. Gosling thought that Crowe was the perfect co-star to bring a film to life that had elements of both comedy and drama. “We all know Shane’s work, and so there’s an inherent understanding of what we’re here to do when we walk into it. I saw it as an opportunity to do a lot of physical comedy that wasn’t necessarily written — but it felt like it was teed up to involve that. I wasn’t sure how that was going to fly when we got there but Russell was really supportive,” Gosling said.
“I remember the first day I went to set — I think it was one of our first scenes, where it was the bathroom stall scene. And I wanted to do this thing with the bathroom door so I went to set early and I was practicing and trying to figure out how to make it work. And I just smelled smoke and I looked behind the door and Russell was smoking, watching me. He was very seriously saying, ‘I think if you hit it with a different leg it will bounce back better,’ and we were immediately having a very serious conversation about the dumbest thing ever — so I knew it was going to be fun. He was such a champion of me taking it to as extreme of a place that I could take it.”