Movies November 27, 2023
Mark Ronson Reveals Ryan Gosling Wasn’t Originally Going to Sing in ‘Barbie’ (Exclusive)
Warner Bros.
“Barbie” raked in $1.43 billion, making it the biggest movie of the year and the biggest Warner Bros. movie ever!
The music was larger than life, too, with songs like Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?” and Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night.”
“Extra’s” Megan Ryte caught up with the movie’s music producers Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt to talk about the soundtrack and the story behind Ryan Gosling’s musical number “I’m Just Ken.”
Mark shared, “The first thing that came was like, 'Okay, Greta Gerwig is doing Barbie,’ it's already bizarre and not what anyone is ever going to expect.”
Andrew added, “We knew that maybe this was going to be one of those big moments in culture, and that’s when the pressure kicks in.”
As for Ryan’s showstopper “I’m Just Ken,” Mark said, “Ryan wasn't originally going to sing in the film... Greta loved the demo and she was sending all the music to Ryan… so the next thing we know Greta and Noah [Baumbach] were rewriting the whole battle scene to incorporate this song that we wrote, and then obviously as we saw the film we started building up the song more and more.”
Megan asked if they are already looking ahead to an “I’m Just Ken” Oscar performance.
Ronson, who won an Oscar for co-writing the “A Star Is Born” hit “Shallow,” insisted, “We have to get nominated!” Then teased, “If they need us, we’ll make ourselves available.”
Ryte also spoke with the masterminds behind Barbie’s crazy world, set designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer.
It turns out they had to play catch-up!
Sarah shared, “The first thing we had to do, literally, was buy a Barbie.”
That’s because they both grew up in the U.K. with what she described as “a funny little thing called Sindy, which is a smaller, flat-footed version of Barbie.”
She went on, “We didn’t know quite what a Dream House was and then it was a massive journey of what does it mean to be a doll?”
Katie said from there it was all about the color.
She explained, “We had like a hundred pinks we had to whittle down to about 20. Then we had to camera-test the pinks and then we had to put the pinks next to the pinks, which makes that pink go funny pink.”
