He may be an A-lister now, but the star came from unexpected beginnings

People have been left shocked by Ryan Gosling’s childhood after details of it began trending online.

When you think of Ryan Gosling, the sort of thing that comes to mind might be the romance of The Notebook, or his turn as Ken opposite Margot Robbie in Barbie.

Few of us know the details of his troubled childhood, which saw him suspended from school following a shocking incident, before being pulled out of mainstream education altogether.

Brought up in London, Ontario in Canada, Gosling’s parents were Mormons. He described his dad Thomas as a ‘religious zealot’, while he says his mom Donna was a pushover.

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.

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He said: “I also stood in the middle of the street trying to get hit by cars, not because I wanted to die but I wanted to be where the cars were.”

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.”

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Recounting the incident, he added: “And my parents were terrified. They thought, ‘We can’t let him watch movies that are too violent.’”

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.”

After the incident Gosling was diagnosed with ADHD and went into a class for special needs students, before his mom began homeschooling him from the age of ten.

He remembers being desperate to escape his hometown, and part of the reason he pursued acting was that he didn’t want to end up working for a paper mill like his father.

He told the Guardian: “I didn’t want to work in a paper mill, and I wasn’t going to stay in school. I hated being a kid.

“I didn’t like being told what to do, I didn’t like my body, I didn’t like any of it.”

Gosling’s acting career began two years later when aged 12 he beat some 15,000 hopefuls at an open audition to join the Mickey Mouse Club.

The rest, they say, is history.