‘La La Land’s Ryan Gosling Signs With CAA, First Time With Major

Ryan Gosling has signed with CAA, a move that brings him fully into the major agency star factory for the first time. Bryan Lourd brought him in. Gosling, soaring off his Oscar nominated turn in the Best Picture front runner La La Land, hasn’t had an agent since 2013, when his longtime rep Ilene Feldman folded her IFA shingle and became a manager at LBI Entertainment. She continues to manage him along with Anonymous Content’s Carolyn Govers.

This comes as Gosling completed starring with Harrison Ford in the Denis Villenueve-directed sequel Blade Runner 2049. In late 2015, he and La La Land director Damien Chazelle pledged to work together in a biopic of the first man to land on the moon, Neil Armstrong, and the Universal pic First Man has solidified as Gosling’s next starring effort.

Given Gosling’s abilities and leading man looks, it seems remarkable he hasn’t aligned with a major agency before today. But unlike many young actors with star potential, and even though he started as a 12-year old in Disney Channel’s Mickey Mouse Club, Gosling has never seemed like he was in a hurry to scale the Hollywood heights of superstardom. He made some commercial movies, but his early career was defined by respected offbeat indie films including Half Nelson, Blue Valentine, All Good Things, Only God Forgives and Lars and the Real Girl, the latter a critically acclaimed turn in which he played a man in love with an inflatable sex doll named Bianca. The Notebook had put him on the radar of studios, but Gosling became white hot off Drive, the stylistic action drama directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, followed by Crazy, Stupid, Love, his first turn with Emma Stone.

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All along that path, he started with Govers and later with Feldman, who never wanted to work at a major agency and who along the way discovered talent that included Gosling, Nicolas Cage, Johnny Depp and Josh Hartnett. She ran a boutique agency and most of the majors respected her enough to leave her alone. Some of her discoveries moved on to bigger percenteries, but Gosling did not. Until today.