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Michelle Williams details 'horrible' experience while working with Ryan Gosling on set of 2010 movie
Home>Celebrity
Published 20:22 27 May 2025 GMT+1

Michelle Williams details 'horrible' experience while working with Ryan Gosling on set of 2010 movie

Michelle Williams had to 'live' with Gosling to bring the director's vision to life

Gerrard Kaonga

Gerrard Kaonga

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Featured Image Credit: Jean Baptiste Lacroix/FilmMagic via Getty Images

Topics: Film and TV, Celebrity, Ryan Gosling

Gerrard Kaonga
Gerrard Kaonga

Gerrard is a Journalist at UNILAD and has dived headfirst into covering everything from breaking global stories to trending entertainment news. He has a bachelors in English Literature from Brunel University and has written across a number of different national and international publications. Most notably the Financial Times, Daily Express, Evening Standard and Newsweek.

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Most people would jump at the chance of working with Ryan Gosling, but Michelle Williams has revealed exactly why her experience back in 2010 wasn’t ideal.

Gosling is certainly a big name in Hollywood and has quite the catalogue, but the same can be said for Michelle Williams.

And the pair ended up coming together to star as a couple in the beloved 2010 film Blue Valentine.

The film currently maintains a 7.3 out of 10 rating on IMDb and boasts a Tomatometer score of 87 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, so certainly impressive stuff.

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The film follows Cindy (Williams) and Dean (Gosling) and their romance as a married couple, jumping between the past and future showing them deeply in love one moment and flustered and on the edge of divorce years later.

Speaking on the Armchair Expert podcast with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman, Williams spoke about filming the flick and the most curious thing about it... that she had to live with Gosling for two weeks.

Williams explained the many days of improv she did with Gosling when they 'lived' together (Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)
Williams explained the many days of improv she did with Gosling when they 'lived' together (Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)

Now before you start bugging out, Williams explained she ‘lived’ with Gosling during work hours and this is where the ‘horrible’ aspect comes in.

She said: “We took a break in filming, we shot the first part when they are young and in love and everything is going well and then we took a two-week break and then we lived together office hours, 9-5.

“We did these improvisations during the day, honestly to figure out ways to annoy each other and to destroy this thing we had made.”

So there is your answer as to why they appeared to have such great chemistry in one scene and look like they reallllllly wanted to snap at each other in the next.

Williams continued: “We were having such a hard time of letting go of the thing that we loved. Director Derek [Cianfrance] was like we have got to mess this up and we need to burn it down.

“We did a ceremonial burning of our wedding photo and we learned how to annoy each other.”

The film would jump between time periods showing the pair in love and then hating one another (The Weinstein company)
The film would jump between time periods showing the pair in love and then hating one another (The Weinstein company)

Sounds pretty rough, but the pair did have ‘work’ to do as director Cianfrance would give them assignments to improvise during the day.

When the podcast host admitted that it would prove to be a big challenge to him, Williams admitted that it was a ‘horrible' experience as she didn’t want to give Gosling a reason to hate her, even if it was to get a better performance in the film.

She even joked that this tactic wouldn’t get the go-ahead in today’s filming landscape as producers wouldn’t see the benefit in allowing the two leads time off filming to simply grow into their characters.

Williams went on to be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar while Gosling was nominated for a Golden Globe, so it seems it helped them give stellar performances anyhow.

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