Ryan Gosling made one fan’s dream come true when he visited a coffee shop in Toronto, following a bizarre and ambitious social media campaign to get him to drop in.
The actor was planning to visit the city for its annual film festival when he became the centre of the campaign, which eventually persuaded him to grab a cup of joe with the owners.
So how do you get the Gos to visit you? Well, pull up a chair, because it was quite the journey.
The campaign started in early September, when Joelle Murray – owner of Grinder Coffee in Toronto, Canada – decided to purchase a cardboard cutout of the ‘La La Land’ star.
She then made it pose with cups of the brand’s coffee, before posting pictures of the scene to social media with a plea for Ryan to notice.
Day after day, the café saw its cardboard companion meet new customers:
Cardboard Gos started to get into increasingly creative and weird situations – they had to keep the joke fresh, right? Who knew how long it was going to go on for?
On day eight of the campaign, Ryan arrived in Toronto for the festival, and it was crunch time.
At this point, the coffee shop posted these double-spaced tweets, which is when the blurring of the lines between satire and reality surrounding the whole event was complete:
“Just to let you know #ryangosling we pay for half your Uber ride…#BelieveInSomething,” they tweeted. And believe in something they did.
Later on day nine, the unthinkable happened. The man himself actually showed up:
Joelle was delighted, tweeting: “What a good sport, a well brought up Canadian boy. We truly appreciate Ryan taking the time the time to visit us.”
Props to her – it’s a sweet deal for the coffee company, but our cup is feeling a little bitter. Is it really that easy to get a celeb to show up on your doorstep? Might cardboard cutout campaigning become a thing now?
We’ll have to wait and see.
Given the visit follows the café’s unsuccessful attempt to entice Idris Elba through its doors in 2017, we’re wondering who Grinder might go on to campaign for next. Tom Hardy anyone?
