Ryan Gosling reveals why he’s so excited to star in The Wolfman. The Dark Universe may have gone humiliatingly by the wayside after The Mummy flopped at the box office. But despite this embarrassment, Universal is still interested in exploiting their stable of classic 1930s monster movie characters.
Enter Blumhouse Pictures, the company responsible for smash hit horror franchises Paranormal Activity, The Purge, Insidious and Halloween. By teaming with Blumhouse and adopting their low-budget approach, Universal succeeded in getting their own big non-Dark Universe hit out of 2020’s Invisible Man, starring Elisabeth Moss in a reinvention of the great 1933 Claude Rains horror title. Seeking to pull off a similar trick with another classic monster, Universal is now re-teaming with Blumhouse for The Wolfman, with Gosling in the lead role and Derek Cianfrance taking on directorial duties. The studio first made The Wolf Man with Lon Chaney Jr. back in 1941, and made it again with Benicio Del Toro in 2010.
New Wolfman collaborators Gosling and Cianfrance of course worked together before on the films Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines. It makes sense then that Gosling would be comfortable being directed by Cianfrance on their new Universal/Blumhouse horror project. But the actor indeed sounds more than just content to be working with his Blue Valentine helmer again. In fact he admitted to Collider that he’s excited about their new collaboration on The Wolfman, and explained exactly where this excitement comes from. He said:
I just would do anything with Derek, but the idea of doing something like that just seems really exciting. It’s new for both of us, but in some way, I feel like it’s kind of the movie we’ve made already a few times, but in literal form. We’ve always kind of made the metaphorical version of it, and it’s sort of like the opportunity to really, to just make the literal version of what we’ve been hacking away at.
Gosling’s involvement in Universal and Blumhouse’s The Wolfman was in fact first announced way back in 2020. It was later reported that Invisible Man helmer Leigh Whannell would take on directing duties for the film. But in 2021 news emerged than Whannell had been replaced by Cianfrance, who would also take on scripting duties. Plot details on the movie are of course still under wraps.
Gosling and Cianfrance’s prior two collaborations, Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines, obviously both revolved around complicated and even anti-heroic male characters. Going by Gosling’s new remarks, it seems that he and Cianfrance regard their take on the Wolfman as a similar sort of anti-hero, and see exploring his story as another way of tackling the theme of male identity. Of course the classic movie Wolfman suffers through a quite literal identity crisis, as he transforms from a human into a beast and back again. Gosling is clearly amped up to offer his own version of the Wolfman and take this more literal angle on the sorts of internal conflicts he and Cianfrance tackled in a less-fantastical context in their prior two movies together. Audiences too are excited to find out what Gosling does with one of horror history’s classic dualistic characters. The Wolfman does not yet have a release date.
