Ryan Gosling’s Kenergy has earned him his first-ever Billboard Hot 100 hit song.
His ballad “I’m Just Ken” secured a place on this week’s Billboard Hot 100 list, ranking at No. 87 alongside other Barbie soundtrack tunes such as “Speed Drive” by Charli XCX, “What Was I Made For?” by Billie Eilish, “Dance the Night” by Dua Lipa and “Barbie World” by Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice (with Aqua).
Gosling’s song also made its debut on the Billboard Digital Song Sales chart at No. 39 and ranks at No. 4 and No. 5, respectively, on the Hot Rock Songs chart and the Hot Rock and Alternative Songs chart.
Before Barbie, Gosling, 42, previously charted on Billboard’s Jazz and Jazz Digital Song Sales charts with the song “City of Stars” from the 2016 film La La Land, but the track did not break the Hot 100.
Gosling’s musical scene was a hit among fans — but it almost didn’t happen. “He has a beautiful voice, and he’s a beautiful dancer. We got there organically,” director Greta Gerwig told Rolling Stone last month. “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.”
Gerwig, 40, continued: “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.”
“I’m Just Ken,” penned by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, serves as a summary of Ken’s (Gosling) feelings throughout the film — which follows him and Barbie (Margot Robbie) as they travel to the real world to discover why she is malfunctioning. On the way, they learn things are not as perfect in real life as they are in Barbieland.
“[Mark and Andrew] didn’t even have all the lyrics,” Gerwig explained last month, noting that rock stars such as Meat Loaf were among the songwriters’ inspirations. “They just had a feeling and the skeleton and the lyric ‘I’m just Ken,’ and it just evolved from there.”
Gosling sings more than once in the film. To impress the Barbies, Gosling and the other Kens serenade them with Matchbox Twenty’s 1996 track “Push.” Lead singer Rob Thomas called the song’s inclusion in the movie “hilarious” during an interview with USA Today.
“When I got the call for Barbie, they told me, ‘Ken’s by the fireside, he’s playing the song and it’s his favorite band.’ So I did this thinking I’d be the butt of the joke, and I was fine with that,” Thomas, 51, noted. “I’m pretty thick-skinned. But Julie Greenwald (from Atlantic Records) came to the Hollywood Bowl a month or two ago. She had just seen the movie and was like, ‘You come out of it loving Ken and loving ‘Push.’’ And I was like, ‘Aww. Alright, really good!’”
The song’s role in Barbie was a match made in heaven for Thomas, as he told the outlet that Gerwig, “has been one of my crushes forever.” He added: “I was on a plane one time and I called my wife [Marisol Maldonado], like, ‘Baby, Greta Gerwig just came on the plane, Oh, my God.’ So just the fact that it didn’t diminish my crush on Greta, that’s even better.”
Barbie opened in theaters on July 21 and made $162 million in its opening weekend, becoming the biggest opening debut in history for a female-directed film.
