Sylvester Stallone Says He’s Too Ugly to Play Ken, but Ryan Gosling Should Be the Next Rambo: ‘If I Ever Pass the Baton, I’ll Pass It on to Him’
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Sylvester Stallone appeared on a recent episode of “The Tonight Show” and gave Ryan Gosling his blessing to star as the next Rambo in a potential revival of Stallone’s iconic action franchise. Stallone played the United States Army Special Forces veteran in five movies. The first “Rambo” opened in 1982. Stallone presumably said goodbye to the franchise in 2019’s “Rambo: Last Blood.”
“I met [Ryan Gosling] at a dinner,” Stallone said when asked why Gosling is his top pick to play a new iteration of Rambo. “Obviously we are opposites. He’s good looking. I’m not. Seriously! Could you imagine me as Ken? It doesn’t work at all.”
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“[Ryan] goes, ‘I was fascinated by Rambo and I used to go to school dressed as Rambo and people would chase me away and I still didn’t stop. I’d vacation as Rambo.’ He just kept saying that he had a lot of affiliation with Rambo,” Stallone continued. “And I thought, you know, this is interesting. If I ever pass the baton, I’ll pass it on to him because he loves the character.”
When pressed further about Gosling taking over the iconic action role, Stallone said, “I would say yes but I don’t know if anyone would say, ‘Hey, he’s too good-looking to be Rambo.’”
Gosling, for what it’s worth, is already an outspoken “Rambo” fan. The actor appeared on “The Tonight Show” back in 2011 and told then-host Jay Leno that “First Blood,” the first movie to feature Stallone as Rambo, “put a spell on” him so much that he thought he was actually Rambo.
“I even thought my face felt like Sylvester Stallone’s and I put a bunch of steak knives in my Fisher-Price Houdini kit,” Gosling remembered at the time. “I took it to school the next day and I threw them at all the kids at recess.”
Gosling now has Stallone’s blessing to play Rambo should he want in the future. As for Stallone saying he doesn’t have the looks to pull off Gosling’s Oscar-nominated role as Ken in “Barbie,” it’s somewhat ironic considering Stallone was a big visual inspiration for the character. Gosling told Variety that Stallone’s wardrobe during the 1980s inspired Ken’s trademark mink coat.
“We found out that Stallone wore a lot of minks,” Gosling said. “As long as Ken was wearing it, he was the Ken with the mink — and that separated him from the other Kens.”
Gosling will be back in action star mode when Universal’s “The Fall Guy” kicks off the summer movie season on May 3.
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