See Margot Robbie And Ryan Gosling In Full Neon For Barbie Movie
Photos of Margot Robbie as the titular character and Ryan Gosling as Ken on during shooting of Barbie.
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By now if you’re the kind of person who even knows a person who follows entertainment news, then you’re aware Margot Robbie will appear as the eponymous icon in next year’s Barbie and that Ryan Gosling will play opposite her as Ken (or, at least, one version of Ken). Now we’re finally getting some images from the production. Yesterday photos popped up on social media of both Robbie and Gosling as their Barbie characters, both in enough neon to light up an entire city.
The photos show Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken, rollerblading through a beach community. They’re dressed in neon, literally from head-to-toe, and it’s impossible to not conclude that either they’re dolls from the nineties or they’re teenage gang members from Batman Forever. Don’t miss Ken’s neon fanny pack, by the way. You can see the photos below.
Little to nothing has been revealed about the plot of Barbie and the photos above don’t do much to change that, though it potentially includes details that could be revealing. For one, while the people taking snaps with their phones in the first picture from behind the yellow tape probably aren’t part of the production, the guy giving the pair a confused look from their side of the tape in the second photo almost certainly is an actor involved in the film. His look suggests that the characters Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are playing are not somewhere they’re used to being. There’s also the fact that both are on rollerblades while at the same time lo0king very stiff — almost as if they don’t know what’s expected of them while using rollerblades.
It isn’t much to go on, but those details do suggest the film could be keeping with the basics of what Sony had planned for the project. Barbie was in development for a while at Sony, eventually making the jump to Warner Bros. in 2018 as Deadline reported at the time. Before leaving Sony, the movie Margot Robbie is leading was said to largely take place after the eponymous hero had been “kicked out of Barbieland” for a lack of perfection. She then goes on adventures in the real world in a “fish out of water” story that was being compared to both 1983’s Splash and 1988’s Big.
Both during its time at Sony and since its shift to Warner Bros., Barbie has gone through enough rewrites, directorial changes, and cast replacements to question whether the finished product would look anything like the original conception. The shots of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling in neon certainly suggest that the “fish out of water” element will very much be a thing in Barbie, though admittedly it isn’t a lot to go on.
Before Margot Robbie was cast in Barbie, it was Amy Schumer (Trainwreck) attached to play the American icon, but she left over creative differences. Speaking to THR in March, Schumer said she had wanted Barbie to be an “ambitious inventor,” and that it wasn’t the direction the studio wanted. She gave the example of Sony asking that Barbie’s invention being “a high heel made of Jell-O.”
Barbie will release in theaters July 21, 2023, when it will go head-to-head with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Along with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, the film boasts an ensemble cast that includes America Ferrera (Ugly Betty), Will Ferrell (Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy), Kate McKinnon (Saturday Night Live), Michael Cera (Superbad), Simu Liu (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), Ritu Arya (The Umbrella Academy), Emma Mackey (Sex Education), Alexandra Shipp (X-Men: Apocalypse), Nicola Coughlan (Bridgerton), Issa Rae (Insecure), and more. Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird) is directing from a script by Gerwig and Noah Baumblach (Marriage Story).
