Ryan Gosling looked to the lyrics of Taylor Swift to help him get through a breakup — with Ken.
Gosling returned to “Saturday Night Live” on April 13 for his third hosting gig alongside musical guest Chris Stapleton. He kicked the show off on an emotional note in his monologue as he bid farewell to his “Barbie” character and ushered in a new era for his role in the upcoming movie “The Fall Guy.”
“I’m not going to make any jokes about Ken, because it’s not funny,” Gosling said during the monologue. “Ken and I, we had to break up. We went too deep and it’s over, so I’m not going to talk about it. … I actually am going to talk about it a little bit.”
Gosling compared the feeling of letting go of a character to experiencing a breakup and offered the perfect solution.
“For processing a breakup, there’s really only one thing that can help — the music of the great Taylor Swift,” he said.
The actor broke out into a rendition of Swift’s popular song “All Too Well,” altering the lyrics to relate to the loss of Ken and letting the beloved character go, faux mink coat and all.
“Oh that sweet definition of my washboard abs/ Singing Indigo Girls in the car with Babs,” Gosling sang. “If I said that I was doing fine/ You know I’d be lying/ Because I was just Ken/ And now I’m just Ryan.”
Gosling’s monologue was interrupted by his “The Fall Guy” co-star, Emily Blunt, who chastised him for talking about Ken while promoting their new movie, telling him he was “embarrassing” himself and that he needed to “move on.” But it wasn’t enough to keep Gosling from continuing his song.
“I was there, bleach blond hair/ Now it’s time to wish Ken farewell,” Gosling sang before Blunt came onstage again and smashed a bottle over his head, a nod to his role in “The Fall Guy” as a stuntman.
Blunt continued to try to get him to change the direction of his monologue, going as far as smashing a chair on his back and telling him that “Ken is dead.”
After her failed attempts, Gosling eventually got Blunt to change her tune when he asked her if she missed her role as Kitty Oppenheimer in “Oppenheimer.”
Blunt responded through song, singing, “Father of the atom bomb and a bottle of Jack/ I used to be the alcohol wife of a dude in a hat.”
“‘Cause here we are again back in 2023/ With the ‘Barbenheimer’ summer it was just you and me,” Blunt and Gosling sang together.
“Must confess, we’re a mess to impress/ Now it’s time to wish Ken and Kitty, both of us, farewell,” they added.
The next day, Swift reacted to the duo's take on her song on social media.
“All Too Well (Ryan and Emily’s Version) !!!” she wrote on X. “Watch me accidentally catch myself singing this version on tour. This monologue is EVERYTHING.”
Swift also added a few heart hands and clapping emoji to her post.
Before Gosling got to singing about Ken, he was reunited with his “Barbie” co-star Kate McKinnon, who left “SNL” in May 2022 after 11 seasons.
For the third time, they reprised their popular “Close Encounter” characters Todd and Colleen Rafferty, where McKinnon and Gosling recalled their vastly different experiences being abducted by aliens — for Gosling, usually pleasant, but for McKinnon, always off the wall.
Like the two previous versions of the sketch, Gosling struggled to make it through the “Close Encounter” cold open sketch without breaking, often laughing at his own lines as well as McKinnon’s increasingly more bizarre lines.
The sketch also included a moment when McKinnon crawled between his legs to act out a sampling of the aliens’ inappropriate actions toward his character, which had Gosling in stitches.