Religious zealots, Britney Spears, and battles with Mickey Mouse: Ryan Gosling's strange journey to La La Land

Gosling was born in Ontario, Canada in 1980, bouncing between cities in the region before settling in Cornwall, a stone's throw away from the East Coast of the United States. His father worked in the local paper mill, his mother was a secretary, and both were devout Mormons.

"We were brought up pretty religious," he has said about his familial upbringing. "My mother admits it: She says, you were raised by a religious zealot. She's different now, but at the time, it was a part of everything — what they ate, how they thought."

Bullied at school, Gosling would develop a Brando-infused affectation in his voice to make him sound tough, while a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder saw him prescribed Ritalin as a child. He also struggled to read until he was  10.

"I didn't feel very smart," he said in 2007. "They kept passing me in school even though I didn't know how to do things I should have known how to do. Like, I couldn't read. When you're in class and you can't read and everyone else can, it's pretty frustrating. I couldn't absorb any of the information, so I caused trouble."

Said trouble included an incident in which Gosling, inspired by a Rambo movie he had seen the previous night, brought steak knives to school and pelted them at his classmates during break. The incident got him suspended, and his parents banned him from watching any films that weren't related to nature or the Bible.

"I was a lonely child," he has said. "I didn't do well at school and TV was my only friend. Then, one day, I saw Raquel Welch on The Muppet Show. She was dancing with this big furry spider and I immediately fell in love. She was the first crush I ever had, and I thought, 'How do I get to meet this woman?' And then I thought, well, she's on TV, so to meet her I have to get on TV myself."

His way out seemed to be performing, inspired by his uncle, who worked as an Elvis impersonator. He even gave Gosling his first job... sort of. "I was 'head of security' at eight years old for my uncle. And I earned that 20 bucks!"

Soon Gosling took up ballet, and began to compete in regional dance competitions with moves that can only be described as "MC Hammer-adjacent". Clips of an energetic, 12-year-old Gosling shimmying alongside a parade of female dancers to a song called Touch Me (All Night Long) have graced the internet since 2015, to much hilarity and (slightly red-faced) praise.

"I had my hustle," he has said. "It was whatever I could do to not end up working in a factory. If I had to shake it like a showgirl, I was going to do it."

In 1993, Gosling attended an open casting call in Toronto for Disney's The Mickey Mouse Club, an after-school show featuring musical performances, comedy skits, and Just Say No-style life lessons. He subsequently bagged a part, moving to Florida with his mother to shoot the series.

"It was kind of depressing," Gosling has since conceded. "Because when I got there, they realised that I wasn't really up to snuff in comparison with what some of the other kids were able to do. I remember one time they put four of us in a dance routine, but I was so off. I was on the end, so they just pushed the shot in closer on the other three guys to frame me out."

Despite insecurities, the show proved to be a breeding ground for future stars, among them Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and Keri Russell. (One of the group, Marque 'Tate' Lynche, sadly died of chronic alcoholism in 2015, aged 34.)

The cast were friendly at the time, Gosling recalling playing spin the bottle with Spears. "Britney was a sweetheart," he said in 2013. "She lived right above me, the girl next door. The little girl I used to play basketball and spin the bottle with."

But it was Timberlake with whom he particularly bonded. In fact, Timberlake's mother served as his temporary guardian for six months when Gosling's own mother had to return to Canada for work.

"We actually lived together when we were that age," Timberlake said in 2011. "So we were probably a little closer that the rest of the kids that were on the show just because we had to share a bathroom."

"We used to do terrible things," he continued. "We thought we were so cool. Looking back on them, they weren't as bad as I thought they were at the time. We stole a golf cart. And we were like, 'Yeah, man. We're stealing a golf cart!' We drove into MGM Studios, which is totally illegal by the way. I was like, 'What do you want to do, thug? And Ryan was like, 'I don't know, cuz'. Because that's definitely how we talked."

After the show was cancelled, Gosling returned to Canada, where he was quickly cast in an array of Nineties kids TV classics that always came with that slightly dodgy 'Made in Vancouver' sheen - everything from PSI Factor to Are You Afraid of the Dark? to an episode of Goosebumps called Say Cheese and Die.

But it wasn't until 1998 that he booked his first starring role: playing a young Kevin Sorbo in a kiddie spin-off of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Young Hercules took Gosling to  New Zealand, where he lived for two years. But it wasn't the easiest fit, and he spoke of his insecurities with the part to Teen Magazine in 1999.

"Hercules is part-god and I'm not," he said. "He's a hero and I'm not. Yet we both have the same insecurities: We're not that great with girls! When I first heard about the audition, I told my friends and they said, 'No offense, but look at you!' When you look at me you don't think 'god.'"

Young Hercules marked the moment in which Gosling decided he no longer wanted to play kids, or even follow a similar trajectory to his late-Nineties teen heartthrob co-horts. Instead of chasing the Jonathan Taylor Thomas trajectory, Gosling focussed on serious film. But first he needed somebody to believe in him.

"All you have is a VHS tape of you humping stuff on The Mickey Mouse Club and wearing fake tanner and fighting imaginary sphinxes," he joked in 2011.

Salvation arrived when director Henry Bean took a chance on the former Disney star when casting his provocative drama The Believer in 2000. Gosling won the part of Daniel Balint, a Jewish neo-Nazi, and garnered immediate acclaim.

"Gosling gives a great, dare-anything performance that will be talked of for ages," praised Rolling Stone in 2001.

Writer and director Henry Bean initially wanted a Jewish actor for the part, but changed his mind once he began auditioning talent. "I found that Jewish kids didn't know much more than anybody else," he said. "Ryan understood something abut religion. Mormonism is very demanding, and it isolates you the way Judaism isolates you. And he got all that."

Gosling would later refer to Bean as his mentor. "He's kind of gift-wrapped me a career. The opportunity to do a film like that has given me the opportunity to do the kind of films I do now."

The Believer allowed Gosling the ability to carefully select his future work, which saw him immediately begin to balance between low-budget indies like The United States of Leland and Half Nelson (which netted him his first Oscar nod), and studio films like The Notebook and Crazy, Stupid, Love.

La La Land finds Gosling, in a strange way, coming full circle, the actor dusting off the dancing shoes abandoned at a time when Britney Spears hadn't even so much as looked at a naughty schoolgirl outfit.

After winning a Golden Globe for the role last weekend, along with a probable Oscar nod (and maybe win) in his future, it looks like bopping to a Cathy Dennis remix in 1992 might just have paid off.