“I just don’t know who I am without you,” Ryan Gosling as Ken says to Margot Robbie’s Barbie at the beginning of his newly released song. “There is no just ‘Ken’,” Ken adds soon after, saying that his tanned visage is nothing without Barbie, even though he’s “great at doing stuff.”
The ballad is, in a word, fantastic. The song is just the latest thing released for the upcoming Barbie film from writer-director Greta Gerwig that suggest that the movie is going to be a technicolor delight. Gosling holds nothing back in this musical performance here, properly encapsulating Ken’s spray tan and the angst of living “a life of blonde fragility.”
Gosling isn’t the only Ken in the film, of course. Simu Liu (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) plays another version (we see him briefly in the video above) and there’s a star-studded cast beyond Robbie, Gosling, and Liu, including America Ferrera, Kate McKinnon, Issa Rae, Rhea Perlman, Will Ferrell, Michael Cera, Ariana Greenblatt, Ana Cruz Kayne, Emma Mackey, Hari Nef, Alexandra Shipp, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Simu Liu, Ncuti Gatwa, Scott Evans, Jamie Demetriou, Connor Swindells, Sharon Rooney, Nicola Coughlan, Ritu Arya, Dua Lipa, and Helen Mirren.
Barbie premieres in theaters in the U.S. on July 21, 2023 and internationally on July 19, 2023.
