Ryan Gosling And Simu Liu Threaten Each Other With Lewd Acts In New Barbie Trailer
Ryan Gosling and Simu Liu threaten each other with a "beach off" double entendre in the new Barbie trailer.
Today, the second teaser trailer dropped for Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Barbie movie that features Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, and other big names such as Scott Pilgrim star Michael Cera and Marvel star Simu Liu. As you might expect, most of this teaser focuses on Barbie, and we find out that in the toy-like world the characters inhabit, all women are referred to as “Barbie” and all men are referred to as “Ken.” Things get that more confusing, then, when Ryan Gosling’s Ken and Simu Liu’s Ken end the trailer by threatening to “beach each other off,” an unmistakably lewd reference made for adult Barbie fans who are in on the joke.
In this case, the joke is that Ryan Gosling threatening to “beach” someone off sounds a little too close to threatening to “beat” someone off, and Robbie’s Barbie repeating the lewd line helps drive home how silly it all sounds. We’re betting that this is an intentional wink to the audience about how even some of the innocent characters from our pop culture past had dialogue that could make you blush. For example, this scene seems like an homage to the now-infamous Archie Comics issue of Betty and Me where the cover shows Archie, who is carrying Betty out of the water, telling her that he “had to beat off three other guys” to rescue her (we can only hope Riverdale eventually recreates this scene).
Aside from being a crude joke to make the audience laugh, it’s not entirely clear what Ryan Gosling and Simu Liu are beefing over (or should that be “beaching over?”) in this latest Barbie trailer. An earlier part of the trailer sets up a vaguely antagonistic relationship between the two after Liu follows Robbie’s enthusiastic “hey, Ken” with a considerably-less enthusiastic “hey, Ken” to Gosling. Later, Gosling’s Ken is somehow injured, and he laments that it is only his injury that prevents him from beaching off his foe.
In case you are curious, it’s not entirely clear what a beach-off would be, but it sounds like it might be some sort of beach-based dance-off. And while the lewd joke is meant to make those of us with our heads in the gutter laugh, the trailer makes it abundantly clear that no actual sexual shenanigans are going on between the Kens or anyone else, really. In fact, one part of the trailer has Ryan Gosling’s Ken asking Margot Robbie’s Barbie to stay over at her place because they are dating, and when she asks what they would even do if he stayed over, a sheepish Gosling has to admit that he doesn’t even know.
Ultimately, the teaser trailer does a perfect job: it perfectly establishes Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling’s characters while also giving us an extended glimpse of Barbie’s colorful world. Honestly, after years of Marvel and DC movies turning every climactic battle into a gray slurry of confusing CGI, seeing Greta Gerwig’s wild explosions of color is nothing less than a revelation. Be warned, though: any fans who dare a beach-off joke with Margot Robbie are likely to end up on the business end of Harley Quinn’s hammer.
