Sylvester Stallone Still Wants ‘Barbie’ Star Ryan Gosling As His ‘Rambo’ Successor: “If I Ever Pass The Baton, I’ll Pass It On To Him Because He Loves The Character”
Spencer Baculi
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He’s just Ken – but if Sylvester Stallone has his way, Ryan Gosling might end up also being Rambo at some point in the character’s future.
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The franchise star threw his support behind the idea of Gosling succeeding him in the role of the fictional Green Beret during a February 9th appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
Following the reveal from Stallone that he was actually supposed to cameo in Barbie but was ultimately unable to due to scheduling issues with his television series Tulsa King, the show’s eponymous host seized on the connection to press Stallone about his previous declaration that, should the time ever come for him to hang up the bandana, he would like to see Gosling be the next one to wear it into battle, asking the actor, “Isn’t that bizarre?”
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“I’ll tell you why,” Stallone then replied to the skeptical Fallon. “I met him at dinner, and obviously we’re opposites. He’s good looking, I’m not. That’s how it works.”
Met with a slight groan of disagreement from his host, the actor playfully doubled down, “No, seriously! Could you imagine me as Ken? It doesn’t work at all,” before turning to explain his choice.
“So, he 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, and I vacation as Rambo,'” recalled Stallone. “He just kept saying that he had a lot of affiliation with Rambo, and I thought, you know, ‘This is interesting. If I ever passed the baton, I’ll pass it on to him because he loves the character.”
From there asked by Fallon, “Could that ever be a real thing? He could be the next Rambo?”, Stallone ultimately concluded his thoughts on the topic by further joking, “I would say yes, but I don’t know if anyone would say ‘He’s too good looking to be Rambo’.”
As noted above, this is not the first time Stallone has proposed Gosling as his Rambo successor.
Speaking during the Creed press tour as to which actors he would hypothetically cast to portray his various characters in the future, when pressed on his choice for Rambo, the star declared, “For real? Ryan Gosling. Kind of an odd choice, right?”
While Gosling has yet to directly comment on Stallone’s fan casting, given his admitted admiration of the actor, it seems more than likely that the Drive star would leap at the opportunity to draw first blood.
Asked during a 2022 interview with MTV News as to who his favorite action movie star was, Gosling declared, “I think, look, Stallone. Stallone. He’s such a good actor. So you got action, but you’ve got these, like, amazing characters at the center of it. It was just like, it was a beautiful marriage. I miss those days.”
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Further connecting the two actors is the fact that, according to director Greta Gerwig herself, Gosling’s ‘fur-coated’ Ken-look in Barbie was directly inspired by the same look worn by Stallone throughout the 70s-80s.
“Ryan Gosling also loves Sylvester Stallone,” she told attendees of an October 2023 Barbie special screening. “We had so long to think about it and talk about it, and he and I really did. His faux mink came from Sylvester Stallone’s amazing outfits.”
“When I think of adorned men, I think he’s probably the best one,” Gerwig added. “And I feel like Ken was nothing if not a man in search of adornment. So that was a really key moment where we were like, it is, it’s Sly. And we talked about specific moments we really loved in his films.”
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