At 19, Ryan Gosling played a superhero in a series pilot never ordered but watchable online for free: “The Unbelievables”.
As a Ryan Gosling fan, you may not know the superheroic episode of his career, a pilot that could have become a series if it had been ordered: The Unbelievables.
Just after the failure of Hercules vs. Ares, the series in which he played the young version of Kevin Sorbo from the Hercules series, Gosling was hired to play the main character in The Unbelievables, a co-production between the United States and Canada. The first episode is written and directed by Ed Solomon, who had just written the script for the science fiction film Men In Black with Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones.
“It made me love cinema”: it is perhaps thanks to this film by Jean-Claude Van Damme if Ryan Gosling became an actor!
Ryan Gosling is flying!
Columbia TriStar Television
Basketball is easier when you’re flying!
With The Unbelievables, Solomon dives back into the world of comics. Samantha Esteban plays Jane, a woman with an elastic body, and Ryan Gosling lends his features to Josh, a human capable of flight. Josh is the son of Action Armstrong (Corbin Bernsen), a former member of the superhero group The Unbelievables, now retired.
The villains are Vaudevillain (Tim Curry) and his sidekick Hershel (Steve Carell, then completely unknown). Now more or less tidy and librarians, they must welcome a reading of the book Behind The Steel written by Vaudevillain’s sworn enemy: “The Big S”, suggesting that it is Superman.
Columbia TriStar Television
Steve Carell and Tim Curry
The tone of the series is decidedly comedic, and the best parts of this pilot definitely rely on the scenes between Carell and Curry. We sense the potential for a solid comedy, which mocks the superheroic universe then represented by the Batman films and even before Marvel exploded at the box office the following year with X-Men and Spider-Man (2002), then much later with Iron Man (2008).
The pilot for The Unbelievables will never be ordered into series, and will remain a dead letter. Gosling will play small roles before getting the lead in the independent film Danny Balint, which will get him spotted and put him on the map for The United States of Leland (2003) then Never Forget (2004) . From then on, his career would be launched.
