Michelle Williams didn’t hold back when she recently spilled the tea on what it was like living with Ryan Gosling during the filming of Blue Valentine back in 2009. The 2010 indie drama, directed by Derek Cianfrance, is a gut-punch of a movie about a couple’s crumbling marriage, and Williams told Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast on May 19, 2025, that getting into character with Gosling was “horrible.” The actors, who played Cindy and Dean, went all-in, even living together for two weeks to tear apart the love story they’d built. Here’s the lowdown on their intense process and why it left such a mark.
Blue Valentine follows Cindy and Williams’ Dean from their swoon-worthy early days to the messy unraveling of their marriage. To make it feel real, Cianfrance had the actors shoot the falling-in-love scenes first, capturing their chemistry in Brooklyn and Honesdale, Pennsylvania. But when it came time to portray the couple’s bitter fights, Williams and Gosling, both 44 now, were too connected to their characters’ happier times. “We were having such a hard time letting go of the thing we loved,” Williams shared on the American Expert podcast. So, Cianfrance shook things up, telling them, “We gotta mess this up, and we need to burn it down.”
Enter the two-week break where Williams and Gosling lived together—not full-time, but “office hours, 9 to 5, baby,” as Williams put it, keeping things strictly professional. The goal? To “figure out ways to annoy each other” through improvisations that would fuel the tension needed for the film’s darker half. They even staged a ceremonial burning of their characters’ wedding photos to kick off the friction. “We learned how to annoy each other. It was horrible,” Williams said, laughing but serious.
“I don’t want to give you reasons to hate me. We were having such a good time. The party has to be over so soon?” The process was so tough that Williams admitted it backfired—she ended up disliking herself more than Gosling. “You don’t have to hate me, because now I hate me,” she quipped. “I’m annoying. We were calling forth all our worst qualities!”
Cianfrance would drop by their shared space with scenarios, like sending them to an amusement park with their onscreen daughter, Faith, after a day of staged arguments. Gosling, in a 2010 NPR interview, explained they also celebrated fake holidays, put up Christmas trees, and shopped at Sears to build “real memories” for the breakup scenes. “We spent all this time building it up, and then we had to tear it down,” he said, noting how easy it was to get lost in the film’s raw emotion.
The method acting wasn’t cheap—Blue Valentine was a low-budget film with a $1 million price tag, and halting production for two weeks meant the crew was on hold. “I don’t know if anybody could work like that again,” Williams said, marveling at the gamble. But it paid off. The film’s gritty realism, shot on Super 16mm for the past and Red One for the present, earned Williams an Oscar nomination for Best Actress and Gosling a Golden Globe nod. Critics raved, with Rotten Tomatoes reporting an 87% approval rating and Roger Ebert calling their performances “of unusual depth and power.”
Looking back, Williams’ honesty about the emotional toll of Blue Valentine shows why the film feels so real. She and Gosling didn’t just act—they lived the collapse of Cindy and Dean’s love, from burning photos to bickering over fake family outings. It was messy, uncomfortable, and, as Williams put it, “horrible,” but it’s what made the movie a modern classic.