How does an actor get to know the late Neil Armstrong? For Ryan Gosling, in preparation for Damien Chazelle’s Armstrong biopic First Man, the key was talking to the man on the moon’s two sons, Mark and Rick. Developing a relationship with people who knew him best was Gosling’s preferred method for honoring a private man who made history.
“Playing dad is not an easy task for anybody, because he doesn’t give you a lot to really work with,” Rick Armstrong told The Los Angeles Times. Gosling told the newspaper that if he hadn’t won the family’s support, he wouldn’t have accepted the part.
One particularly meaningful exchange between the movie star and the Armstrong family came in the form of a thumb drive, containing audio recordings of Neil and his wife Janet’s voices in 1968. “I can’t say how helpful that was,” Gosling said to The LA Times. “I kept it with me all the time.”
For the astronaut’s sons, it was important that they impart to Gosling that Armstrong was not the stubborn man the media sometimes painted him as, but just a private one who didn’t care for his own celebrity. The kinship that formed between Gosling, Mark, and Rick made the movie a rewarding process for all of them. “You could see that effort was going into this — that he was taking this seriously,” Rick said of the actor.
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