If you’ve watched a Ryan Gosling movie in the past ten years, you might have wondered why a young man from Canada who got his start dancing alongside Justin Timberlake on a Disney TV show is tawkin’ like dis, as if channeling a mumbly dock worker from deep Long Island. Gosling has admitted to faking it a bit; as he told W magazine last year, “As a kid I decided that a Canadian accent doesn’t sound tough. I thought guys should sound like Marlon Brando. So now I have a phony accent that I can’t shake, so it’s not phony anymore.†Gosling’s full-on Brando can probably be heard most in 2010’s Blue Valentine (even though his tough-guy character Dean is from Florida) or in Drive, which opens Friday (though the accent makes more sense when his stunt driver character is working on an engine), but it also pops up in talk-show appearances. To measure just how and when the actor wields his working-class vocal cred, we’ve devised the Ryan Gosling Accent-O-Meter. Watch the video and see it at work!
