QUESTION:  Tell us about your character, Jacob.  What is his journey in this movie?

RYAN GOSLING:  Well, I started off wanting to play that guy, ‘The Situation,’ from Jersey Shore, but I chickened out and I couldn’t really work it in completely because the character wasn’t really that way.  So, I kind of backed off of that.  Jacob fancies himself a Lothario.  He’s full of what he thinks is wisdom, and very readily shares it with Steve’s character.  But I think in the end he ends up learning more from Steve than he ends up teaching him. 

QUESTION:  You’re also in a lot of scenes with Emma Stone, as Hannah.  Can you tell us about their relationship, and what it was like also to work with Emma?

RYAN GOSLING:  Well, it was scary to work with Emma because she’s so good.  She’s so unique.  Ultimately, it was the best, because there’s nothing that you do that she can’t roll with or turn it into something, even if you throw her a bunch of bad ideas.  She somehow magically turns them into good ideas, or she’ll play the idea as bad, so it suddenly becomes funny.  She’s just pretty masterful at such a young age.  She’s like Gilda Radner.  That’s her favorite actress.  You can see that she, I think, is of that ilk.  She’s one of the greats and she’s just getting started.  So, I felt really lucky to be a part of something so early on in what I’m sure will be a really memorable career. 

QUESTION:  She told us that those sequences with you were the most fun to shoot because the directors told you that you could just say or do anything, and that you had come up with the Dirty Dancing move.  Tell us about that. 

RYAN GOSLING:  Oh, yeah.  Well, I don’t remember how that started, but it just seemed like a good idea at the time.  I thought it would be funny if some guy’s move was someone else’s move, and I thought it would say a lot about him.  I thought it was funny, but then it ended up becoming this huge production.  It took a whole day to shoot it, and I lost confidence in the idea pretty early on.

QUESTION:  Had you ever done the Dirty Dancing move before?

RYAN GOSLING:  I used to do it with my friends when we went dancing, as a joke.

QUESTION:  There’s something about this movie that resonates with a lot of different people.  Why do you think that is? 

RYAN GOSLING:  Right.  I saw it with an audience twice, different cuts of the film, and the audience reacted.  I had never been a part of a screening, certainly of my own, but really in any movie where people were laughing so loud.  Something about it really strikes a chord.  I think it’s because it’s such a great cast.  Every actor in it is the best.  I mean, outside of myself.  [Laughs]

I was new to this whole world, and feeling pretty insecure about it.  But Kevin Bacon and Julianne Moore and Emma and Steve, and even Analeigh [Tipton] and Jonah [Bobo] were great.  Even Josh Groban was killing it.  But it’s also the environment that the directors created.  They wanted to make something that was adult, and that the humor is not crass.  I think they just made a smart comedy.

QUESTION:  With so many of these people that you just mentioned, what was the environment like on set?  Was there a camaraderie among you?

RYAN GOSLING:  Yeah, it was just too much fun.  You just thought it shouldn’t be this fun.  I’ve come from these sets that are very dramatic, and you work very hard to keep a specific kind of an atmosphere, where you’re never making fun of the scenes that you’re in because it kind of demystifies them to you if you’re trying to believe them when you’re in them.  And in this, we were just constantly heckling our own work.  We would sit behind the monitor and everyone would heckle us, or we’d heckle ourselves.  It just was totally unpretentious.  I think it made us all comfortable failing.  In a way, sometimes we would just try and fail because it would be funnier that way.

QUESTION:  Do you think you’re going to do a comedy again?

RYAN GOSLING:  Well, with this crew, sure.

In pictures: The Men To Watch 2012