Featured Image Credit: Donald Bowers/Getty Images for The Weinstein Company
Topics: Celebrity, Ryan Gosling, TV and Film, Sex and Relationships
Olivia Burke
Topics: Celebrity, Ryan Gosling, TV and Film, Sex and Relationships
Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling each received Golden Globe nominations for their 2010 film, Blue Valentine.
And it's a good job they received a nod at the coveted awards show, as the actors both put themselves through the wringer to perfect their characters.
The stars ended up living together while they were shooting the romantic drama, as director Derek Cianfrance thought it would help them authentically embody a real married couple.
However, it's not an experience they look back on fondly, as Williams described the couple of weeks she spent cohabitating with her Blue Valentine co-star as 'horrible'.
Advert
The 44-year-old - best known for her roles in Brokeback Mountain, Oz the Great and Powerful, Venom and Shutter Island - reckons that this method acting technique probably wouldn't fly these days.
During a recent appearance on Dax Shepard and Monica Padman’s Armchair Expert podcast, Williams opened up about what it was like to share living quarters with the Barbie actor.
She played the role of Cindy in Blue Valentine, the wife of Gosling's character Dean Pereira - and they show the dissolution of a marriage in a non-linear style.
The film flits between different points in time, depicting different stages of their relationship which is destined for doom, and the pair filmed the moments where they were 'young and in love' first.
Advert
Shooting the more volatile scenes came later, however, as they'd both been acting lovey dovey for such a long period by this point, Williams and Gosling struggled to transition into resenting one another.
So, the director came up with an idea to 'mess this up' and 'burn down' the on-screen romance - which was to force the actors to live with one another in real life.
Williams explained that Cianfrance pumped the breaks on production for two whole weeks so that she and Gosling could cosplay as a married couple for a fortnight.
"We were having such a hard time letting go of the thing that we loved," she told Shepard and Padman. "Derek was like, ‘We gotta mess this up, and we need to burn it down’."
Cianfrance also suggested scenarios which they could act out, as well as topics for them to argue about, so that they could really lean into the reality of married life.
Advert
The actors even ceremoniously set their 'wedding photo' on fire to really go the whole hog.
According to Williams, she and Gosling improvised a lot too during the 14-day period, to 'figure out ways to annoy each other and to destroy this thing that [they] had made'.
She described the entire experience as 'horrible', adding: "I don’t know if anybody would work like that again."
The Dying for Sex star said she also felt guilty about the fact filming was stopped for a significant chunk of time for her and Gosling's sake.
Advert
"You’ve got a crew that’s on hold," she continued. "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."
Still, it seems Cianfrance's zany idea paid off, as Blue Valentine had a brilliant reception, while Williams got nominated for Best Actress at both the Oscars and the Golden Globes.
From what the stars have said about the 2010 movie, filming it was extremely intense - so intense in fact, that Gosling previously told how even their sex scenes 'felt real'.