Ryan Gosling’s First Roles Were On The Best Kids Horror Series
There has been a lot of buzz surrounding Ryan Gosling lately. Not only is Gosling getting the praise he deserves for his role as Ken in Greta Gerwig’s record-breaking Barbie movie opposite Margot Robbie, but his song from that movie, “I’m Just Ken,” is a hit as well.
The song debuted in Billboard’s Top 100 at 87. So, with his Oscar-worthy performance and a new hit song, it’s not hard to look back at the beginning of Gosling’s career and say those early performances put him on the path to stardom.
Ryan Gosling’s “Horror”-ble Beginning
Ryan Gosling was a young 15-year-old when he grabbed his very first television gig. It came from the horror anthology series, Are You Afraid of the Dark, a series that first ran for five seasons from 1992-1995. The series then was revived once in 1999 for 2 seasons and then again in 2019 for three more seasons.
Ryan Gosling was in Are You Afraid of the Dark and Goosebumps
For Gosling, he appeared in the final season of the show’s first iteration. It was in the second episode in 1995 titled The Tale of Station 109.1 and follows a youth whose obsession with death leads him to a radio station that transports listeners to the afterlife. Zachary Carlin plays Chris Leary, the young boy with a death obsession. Ryan Gosling’s first role has him playing Jamie Leary, Chris’s older brother.
Gosling portrays Jamie as the typical older brother, calling Chris an idiot for his obsession. He pranks his younger brother, trying to snap him out of his obsession. Of course, it is going to take more than Jamie to get him to stop thinking about death. A lot more.
Ryan Gosling leaped from one horror anthology series to another with his second television role. This time it was on Goosebumps, the series based on the R.L. Stine best-selling book series. The 1995 episode, titled “Say Cheese and Die,” has Gosling taking center stage as Greg, a teen who is having a blast taking pictures with an instant camera he found in a spooky old home.
What Greg soon finds out, though, is that the pictures that are developed are not what he actually shot. Instead, the pictures show horrible disasters that involve whoever Greg takes the picture of. What’s worse is that the pictures are starting to come true.
Now Greg needs to find out if he is the cause of these horrible happenings. Is the camera predicting the future or is the camera, through Greg, the reason these bad things continue to happen? If Greg can return the camera to its proper owner, will these events stop happening? Greg has his work cut out for him and not much time to do it.
His Career Actually Started Before the Horror Series Roles
For those of you who have followed the early career of Ryan Gosling, you will probably already know that his career actually began a couple of years before he made his debut on Are You Afraid of the Dark.
In 1992, Gosling attended an open audition for Disney as the Mouse House was preparing for their revival of The Mickey Mouse Club. Being a Canadian kid, Gosling’s tryout took place in Montreal. Gosling won a part in the show, which forced him and his family to move to Florida to be part of the show.
Ryan Gosling was given a two-year contract to be part of the new Mickey Mouse Club. His appearances on the series were a little more infrequent than some of the other cast members because he was not considered to be as talented.
Other Mickey Mouse Club members with Ryan Gosling included Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, and Justin Timberlake.
Other cast members included Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, and Justin Timberlake. He and Timberlake became fast friends. In fact, Gosling even lived with Justin and his family during the show’s second season as Ryan’s mother had to return to Canada because of work-related issues.
The first four years of Ryan Gosling’s career consisted of more of the same. He found time on series such as Avonlea, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, Ready or Not, Flash Forward, Breaker High, and Young Hercules. But Gosling wanted more from his career, so after Young Hercules concluded, he made his jump to feature films.
His first feature role came in the 2000 Denzel Washington film, Remember the Titans. From there, Ryan Gosling has been a Hollywood feature film mainstay with films such as The Notebook, Lars and the Real Girl, The Ideas of March, Gangster Squad, The Nice Guys, La La Land, and of course, Barbie.
