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The ’staches were being flashed at the star-studded Hollywood premiere of The Gray Man, which features the dream team of Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans and Ana de Armas. The film’s bold-faced talent mixed and mingled on the TCL Chinese Theatre’s appropriately gray carpet as a crowd of fans decked out in track jackets and mustaches (a nod to Gosling and Evans’ characters) cheered from the stands.
Meanwhile, the film’s directors, brothers Joe and Anthony Russo, were rolling deep with family and friends when they arrived to celebrate their most high-profile release since 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. The Gray Man is based on author Mark Greaney’s vise-tight series of spy novels, and Joe Russo said adapting the story was actually a pretty easy task. “The great thing is that the books did an incredible job of actualizing this world,” he explained. Such a good job, in fact, that the Russos seem keen to dive further into the novels. “There is potential there for a much larger story to be told, but it’s in the audience’s hands,” Russo said. “They’re going to tell us by how they respond whether they want to see more stories or not. We’re always open to longer-form storytelling.”
Gosling, for his part, seemed more tentative on his way into the screening, telling Tudum: “There are 12 books, so I’d be a gray man for real if we made all of them.” However, he quickly added, “I do like playing the character, though.”
Both Evans and Bridgerton break-out Regé-Jean Page seemed to relish playing their characters, Lloyd and Carmichael, both of whom happen to be pretty heinous jerks. Evans said that Lloyd, like all villains, doesn’t necessarily know if he’s a villain or an asshole. “They are who they are,” Evans said. “I actually just tried to harness a person who’s far more confident than I am.” Page admitted that he had a similar technique, saying he just needed to “think about all the things that you love about yourself and then leave those at home and the bad side will reveal itself.”
The boys are the only ones who get to have a good time being bad (or just badass) in The Gray Man, though. De Armas still seemed giddy about her chance to shoot a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher in the film. “I really, really enjoyed my time preparing for this movie,” de Armas said. “One of my trainers, Chili Palmer, was a former Delta Force member, which is the same background that we chose for my character. He taught me to shoot everything. I went from one little pistol to the grenade launcher, and it was so cool to have that experience of feeling physically what it is like, and the weight of everything.”
It wasn’t all big bangs and bareknuckle badassery on the carpet, though: Three members of the cast, Alfre Woodard, Billy Bob Thornton and Jessica Henwick, all agreed that if they ever got in a scrape in real life, they would choose Gosling as the castmate to come to their rescue. (Sorry, Captain America.) “He’s just so balanced and so cool and level,” Woodard said. “He never panics. He’s always got a wry little sense of humor. And you know, when the shit hits the fan, you want somebody that has a sense of humor.”
Speaking of that sense of humor: Gosling was sporting a sea-foam green suit and platinum hair for the premiere, due in part to his role as Ken in the new Barbie movie. (He told Tudum that he must radiate “Kenergy.”) In The Gray Man, Evans’ Lloyd jokes that Gosling’s character looks like a Ken doll, leading Evans to muse that perhaps he manifested Gosling’s latest career move. “I gotta go through all my dialogue and see what else I'm going to predict,” he joked shortly before the house lights went down on the memorably glitzy evening.
