Brokeback Mountain star Michelle Williams was forced to live with Ryan Gosling while filming their 2010 film Blue Valentine. an experience she recalls as “horrible”.
Following the story of Cindy and Dean, the film oscillates between the start and end of their marriage, moving between the earlier timeline where they are happy and in love and their marriage’s eventual dissolution years later.
However, during a new episode of the Dax Shepard and Monica Padman’s Armchair Expert podcast, Williams recalled aspects of the experience with Gosling as “horrible”.
The pair first shot the scenes where they were “young and in love”, leaving the grittier argument scenes for later in the schedule but having acted moony-eyed for so long, director Derek Cianfrance needed a way to convincingly flip this love to loathing.
“We were having such a hard time letting go of the thing that we loved,” Williams recalled. “Derek was like, ‘We gotta mess this up, and we need to burn it down’.”
He called for a two-week break in filming in which he encouraged the two actors to live together like a real married couple.
As well as the forced cohabitation, they also did a ceremonial burning of their wedding photo. During their time together Cianfrance would give them scenarios and arguments to navigate while they were living under the same roof. They improvised throughout the day to “figure out ways to annoy each other and to destroy this thing that [they] had made”.
Describing the whole experience as “horrible”, Williams said: “I don’t know if anybody would work like that again.”
She also expressed guilt about pausing the production for everybody else. She said: “You’ve got a crew that’s on hold. You’re paying people, I mean, it’s such a small movie, so, so low budget and a small crew, but you’re taking a big down period in the middle of the thing.”
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Despite the difficulty of the experience, Williams went on to receive a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her role in the film while Gosling was nominated for a Golden Globe.
Williams isn’t the only star to have recently revealed an awkward acting situation with Gosling. Jessica Biel also recalled auditioning for a role with the Barbie star while she was “covered in blood”.
Talking on The View she explained how she had to audition for The Notebook while in her trailer at work – the work at the time being Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
She said: “In my mind, I just remember having blood on me and being in that white tank top, and took my cowboy hat off, and was like, ‘Okay, I’d love to fall in love with you, let’s do this’.”
While the role later went to Rachel McAdams, Biel did describe the experience as “very strange, a very Hollywood moment”.
