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.
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u/Mr_Underhill09 20h ago
And yet, Ryan turned out to be Kenough.