Everything Ryan Gosling has said about playing — no, becoming — Ken for the Barbie movie

polygon.com:

There are good press tours and bad press tours, and then there’s what Ryan Gosling is doing on the Barbiepress tour: a godsend.

Gosling has made it no secret that he’s stoked to be involved with the film, and his time promoting it — during which he’s slowly unleashed his full “Kenergy” — has been an absolutely wild ride. There was a time he was sworn to secrecy (telling Vogue, “It would be very un-Ken of me to talk about Ken”), but those days are long past. Now we can revel in his full court impress.

Float into our DreamHouse: Barbie World is Polygon’s dive into everything Barbie, from her legacy as an iconic toy to her presence in games and movies.

Gosling’s Ken era is built on natural star power that can’t be manufactured. As he told GQ, “I care about this dude now. I’m like his representative. ‘Ken couldn’t show up to receive this award, so I’m here to accept it for him.’” And as he accepts the attention on Ken’s behalf, he has gone beyond merely promoting a film and become a phenomenon unto himself. Though Barbie co-writer/director Greta Gerwig and fellow star Margot Robbie apparently “conjured this out of him” — “Up until this point, I only knew Ken from afar. I didn’t know Ken from within. I doubted my Ken-ergy. I didn’t see it,” Gosling said at CinemaCon — it’s taken on a life of its own. Each new public appearance has gifted us with a new quote about how the spirit of Ken compels him.

As Gosling tells ExtraTV, he’s dabbling with dangerous, untested material — “Kenergy you can feel” — noting that “very little is known about Kenergy. And we don’t have the funding for the research.

“We know that it’s real. In my case it came on as a rash, and then it turned into a tan. And then suddenly you’re shaving your legs,