What happened to Ryan Gosling’s ‘La La Hand’ on the La La Land poster? | La La Land

Emma, I have read a Vulture headline that says “Put Ryan Gosling’s Gay Little Wrist Back” but I forgot my password and I need answers.

Some La La Land fans are outraged at a new poster released to mark the 1oth anniversary of the film by Lionsgate, which has “corrected” Gosling’s bent wrist in his celebrated dance pose with Emma Stone.

What was wrong with the bent wrist? Is this gay erasure? I loved the bent wrist!

As do many La La Land fans. It represents a little flourish, a moment of individuality, a rebellion against conformity. But it’s not gay erasure: Gosling himself hated it. Which is why Lionsgate revealed the new poster with the announcement: “Well, Ryan, you have been heard!”

Ryan Gosling hates his own hand? Say more!

In a 2024 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Gosling called it the “La La Hand”, saying the pose “haunts” him because he didn’t realise the dance scene would be used for the film’s poster. During filming, he said, he had ignored the advice of choreographers and flattened his hand where Stone had hers in perfect line with the rest of her arm.

“I thought it’d be cool to put my hand like that,” he told the WSJ. “Now when I look at it, and I have to see it all the time, you know what would have been cooler than this? That,” Gosling said, imitating a straight wrist. “It just killed the energy that way.”

So is Gosling happy with the new poster?

According to Lionsgate executive vice president, Justin Manfredi, who unveiled the “minor adjustment” at an event at Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, the actor loves it. “We let him know and he approved it,” said Manfredi.

Gosling also took things into his own hands earlier this year, fixing his La La Hand in a video with his Project Hail Mary costar Rocky. “This is my hail Mary attempt to fix my La La Hand,” he said.

And the internet has reacted with a sense of proportion, I’m sure.

“This sucks. The gay little wrist ruled. It was a reminder that, while La La Land is a movie about a straight relationship, it’s also a musical, which is the gayest genre. Plus this kind of revisionism flies in the face of the nature of time. Gosling made a decision to have a gay little wrist, and now it’s a part of film history. No take-backsies,” Jason P Frank wrote in Vulture.

Other fans feel that Gosling’s original hand flex reflected something deep about the characters’ mismatched relationship. “I had never noticed it till today, but I do prefer the original if nothing else for the subtle hint that they are on different paths,” wrote one Redditor. “They should have fixed the hand and changed the font to Papyrus,” wrote another, referring to Gosling’s much-loved Saturday Night Live sketches.

“This is gonna be evidence of the Mandela Effect for so many people in five years,” another added. Which pretty much sums up my main fear: we’ll still be talking about this in five years.