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RYAN GOSLING, wearing a grey, striped wife-beater in the glare of the Cannes sun, traces the tattoos on his left arm. "That's my mother and my sister," he drawls. "That's a werewolf dropping a bloody heart. That's a ghost lady visiting her own skeleton." It's hard to believe that this pumped, tattooed man was once a Mouseketeer, singing and dancing on the Disney show that would go on to feature the likes of Spears, Aguilera and Timberiake There's still an innocent spark but, as blood-soaked LA noir Drive shows, Gosling has a dark side; darker than anything he's shown us so far.

This is impressive given he has played a Jewish neo-Nazi (The Believer), a crack-addict teacher (Half Nelson) and a man in love with a sex doll (Lars And The Real Girl). In Nicolas Winding Refn's brutal pulp thriller, he plays a taciturn avenger - Stuntman by day, getaway driver by night - who falls for neighbour Carey Mulligan, and protects her when her jailbird husband is released. Shotguns blast into torsos and faces; hammers, knives (and forks) make mincemeat of flesh; and, in one virtuoso sequence, a human head is kicked to a squishy pulp, making this one that fans of Gosling's chick-flick The Notebook may prefer to sit out.

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It's an interesting choice for an actor who has tended to alternate intimate, auteur pieces with more commercial genre fare. "But after making Drive," he says, "I realise they're not mutually exclusive." Initially planned as a Neil Marshalldirected Hugh Jackman vehicle, the script, based on James Salus' novel, came with an unforeseen offer from producer Marc Piatt. "This is the first time I was given a script and told, 'You pick your director,'" Gosling marvels. His somewhat leftfield choice was the Dane Refn, whose violent, tripnotic Valhalla Rising the actor had recently seen. "So I met him in a restaurant. And he ignored me for two hours."

Gosling didn't know that Refn had 'flu. "He acted bored and disinterested; making noises, like, 'Umm' - which is not an answer. He didn't eat, didn't drink, didn't wanna talk. So I said, 'I'll take you home' I'm thinking, 'How could I have been so wrongT It was quiet in the car, so I turned up the radio to kill the silence. Suddenly REO Speedwagon comes on - Can't Fight This Feeling - and Nicolas. . . I look over and he's crying. He's singing along, banging his knees. He looks and says, 'This is the movie. It's about a man who drives around listening to music because it's the only way he can feel.'"

Gosling laughs. "So the movie became about driving. Not about stunts or crashes, but the spell that being in a car puts you in."

DRIVE IS A WORLD away from the film that had everyone talking about Gosling last year the talky end-of-a-marriage drama Blue Valentine. He loved that movie, but needed a change of pace, asking Refn if there was any way he could say less. "We took out a lot of the dialogue" he says. "It was such a relief. I had to put my trust in Nie. . . trust that he would tell the story and I wouldn't have to. All I had to do was drive."

Asked to choose his wheels, he found a $2,000 '73 Chevy Malibu at a junkyard. "And I rebuilt it," he grins. "I did everything on it except the transmission." Then there was the stunt training. "That was the best time ever. You show up at an abandoned church parking lot and there's a new Cámaro and a new Mustang sitting there. You get in your car and drive it until it won't drive anymore, 'til it's smoking or on fire. Then you get out and a tow-truck takes it away."

Is this kind of attention to detail important? Did he really need to rebuild a car from scratch? Or, in the case of Blue Valentine, spend ten years waiting to be a drunken blue-collar husband? "It depends on the film. My character never has to talk about cars or do anything underneath a car, so it doesn't really matter. But it felt important to me. With every character you play, you have to find a way in."

Does that explain the toothpick in the corner of his mouth as he drives through LA? "It was an amalgamation of things, really. He felt like a guy who'd seen too many movies and done stunts for all these action heroes. But he's the hero; he's the one doing the stunts, so he's a product of all the movies he's seen."

Gosling smiles as he talks in a low growl that barely raises itself above the sound of the nearby sea. He's serious, but not as intimidating as his reputation suggests. Has he found directors are scared of him? "I have encountered that," he nods. "I think that's why I'm interested in working with the same people, like Derek (Cianf ranee, Blue Valentine writer-director) and Nie. We get each other. It's hard when you don't know a director. You spend half the movie developing a dialogue, and lose chances to do something great due to a miscommunication between you, or something's off."

GOSLING'S NEXT collaboration with Refn is on the Bangkok-set crime drama Only God Forgives (Gosling stepped in after lead Luke Evans was cast as Bard The Bowman in The Hobbit), and then they're planning to team again for a remake of kitsch '70s sci-fi classic Logan's Run. "It's like the reverse of Drive in many ways," says Gosling. "He has a vision of it. I'd never seen the film when he first mentioned it, but we were talking about some of the ideas and. . . Well, I don't know how it's gonna work out, because it's still so early in the process. But it will be interesting to see him working with a big studio."

Logan's Run isn't due for a while, but Gosling has a slew of films in the pipeline after a spell of working sparingly. Does he like to work a lot or prefer taking his time? "I used to, but I made a lot of films recently. I guess I hit 30. 1 did a comedy called Crazy Stupid Love with Steve Carell, and The Ides Of March, with George Clooney, Phil Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Jeffrey Wright - great actors. I'm going to do A Place Beyond The Pines with Derek, about a bank robbery. After that The Gangster Squad, in which Sean Penn plays Mickey Cohen."

Though he has no immediate plans to do so, Gosling says that directing a film himself is definitely on the cards. Does he set goals for himself? "Not really. I think now that I'm 30 I'm more comfortable. Maybe it's because I'm playing characters that are older, so it's easier to find good material. But I also have more control, I think."

And how about becoming an action star? "It's funny, the first thing Nie said to me was, 'Violence is art.' At the time, I wasn't really watching a lot of violent films, but I've started now." He laughs. "I've realised that I like blood."

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