It is always difficult to choose your favorite actor. Then again, when someone quotes Ryan Gosling, you can’t help but think that he might smash his way to the top spot.

The 41-year-old Canadian has shown his versatile talents in a range of films now, including Conduct, The Earth, first man, Blade Runner 2049, Notebook and much more. Many consider him a great actor but not an action star.

Well, that could change any minute thanks to Joe and Anthony Russo’s The Gray Man, an action-packed hit epic that hit Netflix on Friday, July 22, 2022.

Ryan stars in the adaptation of Mark Greaney’s 2009 novel of the same name as ‘Sierra Six’, a CIA mercenary who becomes the target of his own organization and global assassins after gaining possession of troubling agency secrets .

The avengers the filmmakers are thinking big again, but it’s all in the details. Speaking of which, are Ryan Gosling’s tattoos in The Gray Man real?

Are Ryan Gosling’s tattoos in The Gray Man real?

Ryan Gosling has tattoos in real life, but got fake ones for his character The Gray Man.

So that you know which ones are fake, let’s list the real ones.

The movie addict reports that the actor has five known tattoos, one of which is The Giving Tree – a children’s book – on his left arm. On one of the fingers of his left hand he has the name Esme, which is for his daughter Esmeralda.

Another – who was seen in The place Beyond the Pineswhere her character had lots of fake tattoos – depicts a woman next to a skeleton, done in minimalist lines on her inner left arm.

His fourth tattoo is one of two the actor did himself. It’s a monster’s hand on his left forearm and then the fifth is a barcode on his left wrist.

Sierra Six’s The Gray Man Tattoo Explained

The tattoo that will be of interest to audiences is touched on in the movie itself, but it’s not a real Ryan Gosling tattoo.

Claire asks about it and he tells her it’s in Greek and the name of a god. He begins to explain the story behind it which reveals that it is a reference to the story of Sisyphus, who was forced to carry a rock up a hill again and again; each time he approached the top, he fell back.

This serves as punishment for his attempt to cheat death.

It’s clearly not a random choice and there may be parallels between Six and Sisyphus, with the tattoo explanation scene inviting the audience to make the connection. Like Sisyphus, Six manages to escape certain death but repeatedly, which Lloyd Hansen (played by Chris Evans) himself notices.

Instead of pushing a rock up a hill over and over again, Six may have gotten a tattoo in prison because he was stuck behind bars living the same day over and over. The mundanity and repetition of prison life – being punished for his deeds or cheating death at the hands of his father – likely influenced him to get the ink.

The other tattoos are also suggested as prison tattoos.

“Might as well make you laugh”

In 2007, Ryan Gosling addressed the nature of tattoos in an interview with The Guardian.

Looking at the barcode tattoo on his hand, the interviewer mistook it for a nightclub stamp and explained that it was “a homemade tattoo.”

He argued that “a tattoo should never make sense because at some point you’re going to hate it, and it might as well make you laugh”.

Judging by his daughter’s tattoo since then, however, it’s likely he’s changed his approach to body art.

The Gray Man is now streaming exclusively on Netflix.

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