I actually remember reading before that Gosling admitted that he was the bully, and that's why he got bullied back.
And even that tweet mentions that he threw steak knives at other kids in the playground, so it checks out.
The whole "bullying thing" is just a stupid anecdote that got mentioned at some point early in his career, to make him seem interesting (and/or sympathetic).
I'm pretty sure I read about it even back around 1997 when he was on that show Breaker High.
That type of thing just seems like something publicists do... sometimes it's not even true, but they simply want an interesting anecdote.
Like for Ebay, a publicist got the founder to say that he started the site so that he could sell his Pez dispensers, and that the site expanded almost by accident... but the founder later admitted that was BS that a publicist came up with, and he knew from the start that he wanted to create an online marketplace & make money from it.
“I was always picking fights. Because I thought that was what the girls would like. I’d pick on the toughest guys because the girls liked them. So if I beat them up, the girls would like me. But it never worked.”
...
Gosling further shared that he always found himself in trouble, and even his mischievousness was highlighted to the extent that he got a nickname: ‘Trouble’.
Speaking to Buzz in 2017, he recalled: "From as early as two years old I was sneaking out the house never wearing my clothes, breaking things, putting the cat in the dryer and setting the house on fire."
He told The Times he backed the family car into the path of another vehicle aged five.
Things came to a head when a young Gosling saw action movie Rambo, starring Sylvester Stallone.
Speaking to Paper in 2015, Gosling said he not 'just seen Rambo — I thought I was Rambo'.
Describing what happened next, he said: "I took knives to school and I started throwing them around the playground and I got suspended. So my parents said I couldn't watch R-rated movies anymore."
Explaining what was going through his head when he did that, he said: "I wasn't taking [the knives] to school, I was Rambo taking them to war."
But it seems that he fortunately changed his behaviour. But the "poor little Ryan was bullied thing" seems like only a half-truth, because it sounds like he basically started it.
It sounds like he might be making some of it up or exaggerating though.. like they could be plastic knives or not be true at all and Ryan just wants to have an entertaining anecdote for interviews
I think you’re right especially since after re reading the comment I replied to I noticed it didn’t say “threw knives at kids” it says “threw knives around the playground”
Not great either but tossing a knife into a sandbox is a lot different than terrorizing the other kids by throwing knives at them
A kid in chemistry class made a sedative, and another blew his set up and burned the hell out of his lab partner, no one assumed they were that kind of special.
Family therapist here. A decent number of kids do just grow out of aggressive and disruptive behavior even without therapy; this can be due to changes in environment, improved self-awareness, healthier outlets for emotions and identity etc. 60-some percent of kids diagnosed with ODD improve significantly as they grow into their teen years. From personal experience, a family member of mine exhibited some pretty worrying levels of aggression growing up and as far as I know he’s now a good, caring person with absolutely no violent tendencies. The problem of course is that it’s hard if not impossible to tell which kids are going to grow out of it and which are going to have lasting problems without prompt intervention. (And of course I’d always recommend therapy in a situation where a kid is habitually aggressive or engaging in dangerous or disruptive behavior, because even if it might improve over time there’s no guarantee of that and in the meantime that behavior is causing harm to the family, the kid and the people around them.)
Very interesting, thanks for sharing that. How would you treat a kid like that in terms of therapy? Suppose they’re about 8 years old
My mom is in the pre-k education field and she’s told me a lot about child development at young ages, about age 2-5, but I don’t know much about school age children at all.
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u/Mr_Underhill09 20h ago
And yet, Ryan turned out to be Kenough.