NMA: Movie star Ryan Gosling saved British writer Laurie Penny from an oncoming car when she stepped out blindly into New York City traffic Tuesday. “Ryan Gosling grabbed me away from a taxi,” Penny tweeted that evening. She said she looked the wrong way before crossing the street because she is accustomed to traffic flowing in the opposite direction in London. Penny has apparently been inundated with press requests following the incident. She claims she is turning down interviews, choosing to instead address the hoopla via a Gawker blog post Wednesday.
GAWKER: Everybody needs to calm down about Ryan Gosling saving me from a speeding car. It was a curious thing that happened to me on the way to somewhere else. I had just bought a nice pink wig to wear to a friend’s party. I was thinking about an article I’m writing about birth control and the importance of reproductive freedom to women’s rights, and I didn’t remember to look the right way. An actor happened to be passing and stopped me from getting run over by a car. I said “thank you.” And that was that. The actor happened to be Ryan Gosling. […] The entire encounter lasted about five seconds. Yes, I was a little bit swoony after it happened — but in fairness, I’ll swoon over a cheese sandwich if it gives me a saucy look. In the interests of composed reporting, I really think the sentiment “Ryan Gosling is a total hero and saved this woman’s life!” needs to be reassessed, even though it’s technically accurate. People do lovely, considerate things for other people all the time. I don’t believe that the fact that A-list celebrities occasionally act like human beings is in itself news — it might have been slightly newsworthy had Mr. Gosling simply floated by on a cloud of his own cultural significance whilst a young woman got smeared into the tarmac, but lucky for me, even the most chiseled-jawed of us are usually boringly dependable in times of minor peril. MORE