Ryan Gosling Is Completely Endearing in Latest Showbiz Anecdote

Ryan Gosling’s smirking, sun-dappled face will appear twice over the course of the Cannes Film Festival: in the erotically violent Nicolas Winding Refn film Only God Forgives, and then briefly in a documentary about the ruthless business behind movie-making, Seduced & Abandoned, where he shares a few charming stories about his career, the absurdity of aspiring actors, and all those times as a young boy he rubbed his boner all over VHS tapes. Brace yourself.

Seduced & Abandoned was made by James Toback and Alec Baldwin, and it will air on HBO later this summer, just when you’ve most likely had your fill of cloying summer blockbusters. It chronicles the duo’s attempt to make (or pretend to pitch) a remake of Last Tango in Paris called Last Tango in Tikrit starring Baldwin and (blast from the recent past) Neve Campbell. According to Vulture’s Jada Yuan, it isn’t really clear whether Toback and Baldwin really intend to make such a movie (I’m going to go with a big NO), but they probably had a lot of fun listening to potential financiers give them funding advice. To get the $15-20 million Toback and Baldwin are asking for, financiers offer them some words of wisdom: hire Ryan Gosling (or someone like Ryan Gosling).

Ryan Gosling in a Last Tango remake? Sure! Maybe it even becomes a mega blockbuster if you throw in a Marlon Brando hologram, which arm wrestles Gosling for some reason. The only hitch is that Gosling never signs up for the movie. He does, however, give Toback and Baldwin a hilarious string of anecdotes that go something like this:

He doesn’t sign on to the hypothetical movie, but does give them a delightful interview about his Hollywood experience, revealing that his first onstage performance was with his Elvis impersonator uncle when he was three; describing in hilarious detail what it was like to go to auditions as a no-name actor when casting agents would take cell phone calls in the middle of his scenes; comparing L.A. to a land of Don Quixotes (“We’ve all had the same dream, but no one is sure if it’s a premonition or an illusion”); and telling the story of how as a little kid, he was so movie-obsessed the only way his mother could punish him was by taking the[m] away from him. “I loved movies so much,” he jokes (I think), “sometimes, I’d shove them down the front of my pants. I liked the way they feel.” The best Gos moment, though, is his vivid tale of the time he thought he might die on a nose diving airplane. Everyone else was looking into the eyes of the person next to them, because this was the person they were going to die with, says Gosling, “and my first instinct is to finish my steak.”

That’s right, folks — Ryan Gosling loved movies so much he used to rub them all over his peeper. At least, that’s what it sounds like.