Ryan Gosling’s 'I’m Just Ken' Oscars Performance Brings The Mojo
This very Slashy performance was definitely a ten
Ryan Gosling may have already lost the Academy Award for Best Original Song to the also-from-Barbie “What Was I Made For?” by Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas, but his long-awaited performance of “I’m Just Ken” was a top highlight of the ceremony, and even Deadline said it “brought down the house”, or in this case the Mojo Dolby Casa Theatre, or something. It was probably his biggest live musical performance since his Mickey Mouse Club days.
Gosling started in the seats, singing directly to his Barbie, Margot Robbie, making his way to the stage where songwriter and producer Mark Ronson awaited. On the stair set piece, his fellow Kens Kingsley Ben-Adir, Ncuti Gatwa, Simu Liu and Scott Evans joined him not for a recreation of the original choreography from the film, but instead a giant Barbie-fied homage to “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”, sung by Marilyn Monroe in the 1953 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Each of the other Kens get the camera focused on them for a moment before popping out and revealing Gosling with Slash of Guns N’ Roses, who is lead guitarist on the track in the first place, and a rhythm guitarist with Wolfgang Van Halen. Yeah turns out the song was born going hard. He also went back out to the audience, giving Robbie, director Greta Gerwig, and co-stars America Ferrera (who lost Best Supporting Actress and Ryan Piers Williams (Ferrera’s IRL husband who played Gloria’s husband and Sasha’s father in the film) a chance to sing along. Notably, he also made his way to his La La Land co-star Emma Stone, serving a cute reunion there. Later on, as she accepted her second Oscar for Best Actress, this time for her performance in Poor Things, she would claim rocking out to the performance broke her dress.
It was grand and epic, necessitating an 40-piece orchestra, 24 OG Barbie cardboard cutout heads, and 62 other dancing Kens. After the show, details about how the performance came together started flooding out. Just before the performance, it was Liu who asked the audience to hold up their phone flashlights and sing along, and they certainly complied. Whatever air of doubt there was, it was still over a lot of talking: Oscars producers had been talking to Gosling for months, such as Molly McNearney, who was among the group with Raj Kapoor, Katy Mullan and Rob Paine. She said “Ryan Gosling is a true professional, that man — we met with him on Zooms months ago, talking about that performance. Greta Gerwig weighed in creatively as well. He was so committed to it. His choreographer, Mandy Moore, is exceptional — she was on all the calls. So was Mark Ronson.”
She also said the homage was Gosling’s idea, elaborating “That’s where the pink suit, and everybody else in black came from — and the stairs in the back. And we had an homage to the candelabra girls: We had Ken-delabra men.” Gosling’s involvement was especially crucial as he reportedly mapped out almost every movement “He was pretty clear about his overall structure of it,” Moore said, “He wanted to start in the audience, come up see Mark, see Andrew [Wyatt the co-producer], ignite the Ken-delabras and then join the 10 dejected Kens on the stairs,” she described. “From there he wanted the rest of the number to evolve as if Kens were coming from everywhere, ‘Calling All Kens.’ Eventually ending in a huge celebration revealing Slash.” It turns out Liu’s plea to the audience was a fulfillment of vision with its roots in Gerwig that passed through Gosling, and that’s why the lyrics were put on the stage’s screens, and she, Ferrera and Robbie were right up front, he desired their direct involvement. The kiss of the cameraman’s hand and the pull up on to the stage? Also planned. Variety covers the revving up with rehearsals as well.
To top it off, Gosling’s wife, actress Eva Mendes, posted to Instagram a photo of her wearing Gosling’s iconic pink, bedazzled, custom Gucci blazer from his performance, along with a black cowboy hat, captioned “You took Ken all the way to the Oscars, RG. Now come home, we need to put the kids to bed.”. ABC, the Academy, and Atlantic Records each have their own upload of the performance, with ABC’s heading toward 3 million views as of original writing, but Atlantic Records’s is the last one standing public as of November 2024.
