Ryan Gosling may be just Ken, but if he returns to Barbie Land, he’s hoping to play a different version of the iconic character.
“Can it be a husky Ken? Can I play Husky Ken, like Sandwich Ken? Can I play that Ken next time?” Gosling, 43, quipped to Variety on Friday, December 8, adding that the cast knows “nothing” about a potential sequel.
Gosling was joined by his Barbie costar America Ferrera who echoed similar sentiments about a follow-up movie.
“We have no information,” she told the outlet. “I will say, what Greta [Gerwig] and Margot [Robbie] have said is they did not set out to make a franchise. They put it all out on the table. Every bit of it that they loved and that they knew to do, they did. Which is refreshing, right? We’re not setting it up for 20 years of ‘Barbie’ movies. But then again, I know nothing, so there might be 20 years [of Barbie] … or a Ken spinoff?”
Barbie, which hit theaters in July, earned more than $1.4 billion at the box office. For his role of Ken, Gosling has received both critical and fan praise. He also earned his first-ever Billboard Hot 100 hit song for “I’m Just Ken,” which is up for Best Song Written for Visual Media at the 2024 Grammys. However, Gerwig, 39, confessed it took some persuasion to get Gosling to perform a musical number.
“He has a beautiful voice, and he’s a beautiful dancer. We got there organically,” the director told Rolling Stone in July. “I think if I had said, ‘I want you to sing and dance in this movie,’ he would not have necessarily done that for me. But it was kind of that thing of boiling a lobster. I think by the time he was singing and dancing, he didn’t even totally know how we had gotten there. But he’s so fabulous at it.”
While Gosling wasn’t sure if he truly embodied the spirit of Ken, he credited Robbie, 33, and Gerwing for helping him reach his full potential.
“Up until this point, I only knew Ken from afar. I didn’t know Ken from within,” he reflected at CinemaCon in April. “I doubted my Ken-ergy. I didn’t see it. But Margot and Greta conjured this out of me.”
Despite the film’s overall success and domination of pop culture, Gerwig also isn’t in a rush to create a sequel.
“At this moment, it’s all I’ve got,” she explained in a July interview with The New York Times. “I feel like that at the end of every movie, like I’ll never have another idea and everything I’ve ever wanted to do, I did. I wouldn’t want to squash anybody else’s dream but for me, at this moment, I’m at totally zero.”
Robbie, for her part, agreed with Gerwig’s thoughts about leaving the film as a standalone.
“I think we put everything we had into this one,” Robbie said to the Associated Press in November. “We didn’t build it to be a trilogy or something. Greta put everything into this movie, so I can’t imagine what would be next.”
While Barbie 2 might not be hitting theaters anytime soon, Mattel is planning on releasing more films centered around some of their iconic toys. Polly Pocket, Hot Wheels and American Girl all have projects currently in the works.
