Back in 2010, Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling acted together in Blue Valentine.
The film stars Michelle and Ryan as a married couple named Cindy and Dean, and both actors received widespread critical acclaim for their performances, including a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Michelle. And now, during a new episode of the Armchair Expert podcast, Michelle looked back on all the very unconventional prep that she and Ryan put in to make their performances feel so real.
First of all, if you’ve not seen it, Blue Valentine bounces back and forth between two linear narratives: the start of Cindy and Dean’s relationship when they’re happy and in love, and the eventual dissolution of their marriage several years later.
Michelle said they shot the scenes where they were “young and in love” first, which was all great. However, this filming schedule meant that when it eventually came time to shoot the fighting scenes, she and Ryan struggled to make it look convincing.
So, with the hopes of making it easier for Ryan and Michelle to pretend to hate each other, the director Derek Cianfrance called for a “two-week break” in filming and encouraged the two then-28-year-old actors to live together like a real married couple.
“We were having such a hard time letting go of the thing that we loved,” Michelle recalled. “Derek was like, ‘We gotta mess this up, and we need to burn it down.’ And we did a ceremonial [burning of] our wedding photo… We took a break in filming, and we lived together. We did these improvisations during the day, honestly, to figure out ways to annoy each other and to destroy this thing that we had made.”
Now, I don’t know about you, but living in a house with someone with the sole task of figuring out how to annoy each other sounds truly awful — even if that person is the wonderful Ryan Gosling. And it seems like Michelle found it as unpleasant as you’d expect, calling the experience “horrible.”
“I don’t know if anybody could work like that again,” she said, remembering that Derek would give them scenarios and arguments to navigate while they were living under the same roof. “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.”
As a chronic people pleaser, this sounds like my worst nightmare. That said, it has given me a great idea for a rom-com script: two actors who fall in love while trying to convincingly play a married couple that hate each other. Perfect.
You can listen to the full episode of the Armchair Expert podcast here.