Deep beneath the old castle fortifications in Budapest, on a hill just west of the Danube, is a subterranean labyrinth that winds for several miles. At the very end of one twisting tunnel, a long walk from the surface, there is a chamber, and in its center, barely visible through the smoke that fills the room, is a small crouching statue of a grotesque, winged demon perched above a flat rectangular tombstone. The tomb's purported occupant is identified by a single chiseled word: DRACULA.

This is where Ryan Gosling has chosen to meet.

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Notes on the Early Life of Ryan Gosling #1

He hated being a kid. He just didn't like the way it felt, and he wanted it to be over.

“I just felt this sense of: I have a limited amount of time and, you know, I've got to get started. I also didn't like the arbitrariness of control that people seemed to have over me.”

I think most kids don't know to question that. They just accept it.

“I think my mother encouraged that. I had one teacher, because I was dancing, he thought that was funny and he would make jokes about it in class, and my mother said, ‘You know, if ever you feel like he's being disrespectful, you can just leave.’ And I did one day. I called her and said, ‘Hey, I left.’ Also, when I was homeschooled for a year, I saw my curriculum come in the mail, and I saw that it was just this tangible stack of books—I guess I realized that there were other ways to do it. The fact that I could stay home and watch Planet of the Apes in the morning and then go downstairs and draw while I learned about some historical battle—draw these maps and scenarios and connect to it in a way that was personal to me—I just felt like: Oh well, then there must be another way to do everything.”

And so why would Ryan Gosling choose to meet at Dracula's underground tomb? Did he choose somewhere as far and different as possible from the magical star-filled Los Angeles skies of his new movie, the musical La La Land? Or is he looking to suggest something profound about time and mortality and notoriety that is better demonstrated than explained? Or is it just that, when you're Ryan Gosling, arranging a spooky rendezvous deep below the surface of the earth might be a way of at least staving off the questions he knows are coming? In marked contrast to the thrilling and eclectic parade of characters he's portrayed on-screen (just to pick a few career highlights: The Believer; Half Nelson; Lars and the Real Girl; Blue Valentine; Crazy, Stupid, Love; Drive; and The Big Short), Gosling has generally preferred to play his cards close to his chest offscreen.

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Fittingly, when he strolls into Dracula's purported final resting place, Gosling offers little clarification about this choice of location, except to note, “If we start with a torture chamber, everything's uphill from here,” which sort of makes sense and sort of doesn't. (For the record, there is little serious pretense that Dracula is really buried in this tomb, though supposedly Vlad the Impaler was imprisoned somewhere in these catacombs in the 15th century.) We linger for a few minutes, making small talk, but it's clear pretty quickly that we've already done just about all there is to do here. As we wind our way to the exit, though, he does acknowledge an ingrained affinity for such places. “My mom used to hang out in graveyards when I was a kid, so…,” he says. “She used to like to read the headstones. So they weren't sort of scary places.”

We emerge into a wet, dark Saturday afternoon. On the street, Gosling tells a man in a parked car that we're going to walk, and we head off, looking for somewhere to sit and talk. Maybe a hundred yards later, a different man approaches Ryan and gives him a briefing about which cafés and restaurants nearby are open, and which are full. It's funny, the way these people associated with Gosling keep appearing out of the rain and darkness; I begin to imagine that there might be dozens of them. I tell Gosling that I like the way he seems to have someone on every block.

He nods. “Someone on every block,” he repeats.

Notes on the Early Life of Ryan Gosling #2

One evening when he was in first grade—he was raised in Cornwall, Ontario, where his father and most of his male relatives worked for the local paper mill—young Ryan Gosling saw Sylvester Stallone's primal and brutal revenge drama First Blood, the original Rambo film, on videocassette. The next day, he packed his Fisher-Price magic kit with the Gosling family steak knives. Suitably armed, he headed to school, ready to put into action the new lessons he had just learned.

“I think I saw it too young,” he says. “I wasn't able to separate those realities. I don't blame it on the film. Part of being a kid in the '80s was that these movies, we didn't have the experience necessarily of going to the theater, of this thing outside your life. You would watch it while you were falling asleep on the couch, or you could re-watch it, and they were tangible things, these VHS tapes, and they were like friends of mine. And so I connected with them in a very, you know, personal way.”

Even so, you might assume that taking a set of knives to school was just some inappropriate, but ultimately harmless, playacting. But when I ask Gosling about what was going through his mind that morning, his reply makes clear that the boundaries between reality and fiction were still precarious, even dangerously shaky, at that point in his life.

“I just remember there being, like, some injustices on the playground, you know. That there was bullying going on, or something. And I felt like”—he laughs—“that's the feeling I remember. There was something unjust going on.”

So you weren't just going to school and playing Rambo—you were going to sort shit out?

“I didn't think it through, you know. I just thought, in my mind: This is not right, what is happening, and something has to be done. Thank God, you know, I was suspended.* I should have been. My mother was mortified. And it was like reality came in. I had to get control of my imagination.”

*After the print version of this article went to press, Gosling's representative contacted GQ to say that Gosling had just asked his mother about this event, which he has alluded to in interviews for many years, and she told him that it actually took place when he was 4 years old and in kindergarten, and that he was not actually suspended.

Did that feel like a good lesson learned? Or like you'd had your imagination reined in?

“No, it felt like a lesson learned. I think I felt pretty guilty about that. I think. Although, I don't know. I was so young, I don't know what the fuck was going through my head.”

In all these things, did you feel as though you were different from most of the kids you were around?

“Not in a good way. I was doing very badly in school, and I just couldn't remember what the teachers were talking about. I felt like it looked easier for everyone else and it was harder for me. It affected my self-worth.”

Did people tell you that you weren't smart?

“I mean, they started feathering me into some special-education classes and things like that. I mean, I remember playing chess with a kid who was eating his queen, you know.”

Gosling has been in Hungary for most of the past four months, filming the Blade Runner sequel, Blade Runner 2049. “It's like three movies that I usually make in one,” he says. “Just in terms of the length and just the whole scope and experience.” I ask how it's going, and he quotes something his co-star Harrison Ford said the other day: “cautiously optimistic.” But he knows that people have high expectations, and how treacherous those can be. “The snipers,” he says, “are in the bell tower, waiting.” But, that aside, he says that he can't tell me much: “I've never done something so shrouded in secrecy or where there's so much anticipation.”

Did I hear that Harrison Ford punched you in the face?

He looks surprised. “How did you hear that?”

I've got people on every corner, too.

“Yeah, he did. It was kind of, you know, a rite of passage.”

How did it happen?

“We were just doing a fight scene and, you know, it just happened. But what was funny was, when it was over, they brought ice for my face, and Harrison pushed me out of the way and stuck his fist in the ice.” He laughs. “I asked him the other day where he got his sense of humor from—was it from his mother or his father? He said, ‘Sears.’ And he didn't have much time to shop around so he just had to grab one and get out.”

So did it hurt when he hit you?

“You know…he's tough. He's been an inspiration to everyone—everyone is doing push-ups now and taking an interest in their fitness. As soon as it happened, the director came up to me and said, ‘Look at it this way—you just got hit by Indiana Jones.’ ”

Was he suitably apologetic?

“He came by afterward with this bottle of scotch, and I thought, ‘Oh, I knew this was coming.’ And he pulled out a glass from his pocket, poured me a glass, and walked away with the rest of the bottle. So I guess he felt like he didn't connect enough to earn a whole bottle.” He smiles. “You know, they say don't meet your heroes, but I would say the addendum to that is ‘…unless they're Harrison Ford.’ 'Cause he's a cool motherfucker.”

Notes on the Early Life of Ryan Gosling #3

One of the great bait and switches with Ryan Gosling is that his face and demeanor send the signals of a regular guy, even while it's clear there's just as much deep and dark and strange stuff sloshing inside of him as in just about any other weird-guy actor.

Here's one characteristic example—an insight into how movies helped shape his young mind, and how over time they beckoned him toward them:

“Like, when I saw Dumbo and The Elephant Man—I felt like those films were smashing down some wall inside of me and creating a room called empathy. And being very grateful for having seen those films even though they were painful, and the idea of watching them again was scary, because I didn't know that I wanted to feel those things again, but it did feel different after seeing them. Like they had exposed some part of myself to me that I didn't know was there.”

As he says this to me, I realize he's being utterly sincere, but I'm also confused: Is he saying he saw these two very different movies at the same stage of his life? And surely he's aware of the surreal elephant theme here? But he sort of ignores me when I ask these questions, as though they're the kinds of things you'd only bring up if you hadn't really been paying attention to what he was trying to say.

“I don't know why I put them together,” he says. “But I guess I remember feeling for both of those characters.”

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We escape from the rain into a restaurant whose name translates as the Black Raven. He orders coffee and talks about what he found in acting, and at first it sounds like the kind of earnest but boilerplate spiel that hides what it offers to reveal, but then what he says shifts into something more personal and heartfelt.

“I didn't grow up watching independent films or art films,” he says. “I just generally watched whatever blockbusters came to our theater. But the people I grew up with weren't reflected in the movies I was watching growing up.” What was invigorating and inspiring was the discovery that there were movies—and, later, that he could be in movies—that felt like they were filled with the real people he knew. “Because I was always so fascinated by my uncles, my family, how complicated they were, the light and dark sides of them. It wasn't something that was part of the dialogue in our family, or in school, or in life. It was just something that I was just kind of privately clocking, and being compelled and repelled by. When I saw there were people out there trying to capture that on film, and reflect that and celebrate that, the messiness of it all, it felt very exciting.”