Jessica Biel brought a unique take to her audition with Ryan Gosling for Nicholas Sparks’ The Notebook.
Reflecting on the experience during the Wednesday, May 21, episode of The View, Biel, 43, revealed that she was also “covered in blood” for her screen-test with Gosling, 44.
“I’m racking my brain to make sure I didn’t accentuate this story,” Biel quipped. “I was shooting The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [when] I was super young.”
According to Biel, she was still wearing the fake blood when she went to read for the role in the 2004 romantic drama.
“It was going to be the greatest option for me in my career,” Biel recalled. “Ryan and the director, [Nick Cassavetes], came to my trailer. They came to us on location, and we auditioned in my trailer at work — and I didn’t get it.”
She added, “In my mind, I just remember having blood on me and being in that white tank top. [I] took my cowboy hat off and was, like, ‘OK, I’d love to fall in love with you. Let’s do this.’ It was [a] very strange, very Hollywood moment.”
Gosling portrayed Noah Calhoun in the feature film, starring opposite Rachel McAdams as leading lady Allie Hamilton. While Biel didn’t get the part, she did end up falling in love offscreen with now-husband Justin Timberlake, who coincidentally has his own association with Gosling.
Timberlake, 44, and Gosling both got their start on The All-New Mickey Mouse Club in the early 1990s.
“Funny enough, his mother had to keep her job in Canada [during] the second year that we were on the television show, and my mom was his guardian for, like, six months,” Timberlake previously said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2011. “We actually lived together … [and] we were probably a little bit closer than the rest of the kids [who] were on the show just because we had to share a bathroom.”
At the time, Timberlake gushed that Gosling was “one of the best actors of our generation.”
“We used to do, like, terrible things. We thought we were so cool,” Timberlake added at the time. “Looking back on them, it wasn’t as bad as I thought they were at the time. We, like, stole a golf cart. We were like, ‘Yeah, man, we’re stealing a golf cart.’ Meanwhile, it’s on a back lot [and] there’s just golf carts everywhere.”
According to the former ‘NSync singer, he and Gosling would then drive their borrowed vehicles over to get milkshakes between takes.
Timberlake started dating Biel in 2007, three years after The Notebook was released, before they got married in 2012. Together, they share two sons.
