Get ready to be blown away by the electrifying collaboration between Ryan Gosling and David Leitch, who are sure to deliver something truly special that you won’t want to miss.
The TAG Heuer campaign featuring Ryan Gosling is a marketing campaign by TAG Heuer, a Swiss luxury watchmaker. The campaign features the actor Ryan Gosling as the brand ambassador and Vanessa Bayer (SNL) for TAG Heuer’s iconic Monaco collection of watches.
The campaign was launched in 2019 and features a short film directed by Nicholas Winding Refn, who also directed Gosling in the movie Drive. The film, titled “Dont Crack Under Pressure,” showcases Gosling wearing the Monaco watch while driving a vintage sports car in the streets of Los Angeles.
“A thumbs up comes in handy when we’re doing these campaigns,” says Ryan Gosling, giving it his best Fonzie impression. “You can only do so much pointing at things that aren’t necessarily there, so the thumbs up solves a lot of problems. There’s also the thumbs down situation, too,” he adds, demonstrating the kind of versatility that’s got him to where he is today. “Either one works well for the watch.”
The campaign aims to showcase TAG Heuer’s heritage and connection with motorsports, as well as its commitment to innovation and excellence. The Monaco collection, in particular, is a symbol of TAG Heuer’s long-standing relationship with the world of motorsports, and the campaign seeks to highlight this connection through Gosling’s portrayal of a cool and confident driver.
Overall, the campaign is a high-profile marketing effort by TAG Heuer to promote its luxury watches and reinforce its brand image as a symbol of style, precision, and excellence.
“They created this beautiful Art Deco hotel facade in the ad and called it Leonarda, which was Jack Heuer’s wife’s name so there was a lot of love and care put into this from the TAG Heuer team and they had a lot of fun making it too. As an aside, it’s been really great working with them,” Gosling says. “They’re so agile creatively. They’ve found a way to make every campaign that we do match the tone and aesthetic in some way to whatever the film is that I’m making at the time.”
Leitch, who makes a cameo in the commercial as himself – “We did a lot of improv in that scene, there’s a lot on the cutting room floor,” he says – agrees about Bayer. “When you work with someone like Vanessa, who is obviously incredibly talented at improv, and then Ryan, who’s actually really adept at it, you start out with this sketch skeleton of what you want them to say but then you just have to let them go and see what magic comes,” says Leitch, who’s more than happy to double down on what it’s like working with Gosling, on this commercial, but primarily looking ahead to the release of The Fall Guy next year.
“We really wanted to do something that would stand out in the watch marketplace. What happens a lot is you get these really slick [ads] that are great but they’ve been done so we were trying to do something more subversive, more fun – maybe a satire on the action genre,”
says Leitch.
This story originally ran on British GQ with the title “Ryan Gosling as a watch thief in TAG Heuer’s new campaign is his funniest role yet”
Brand TAG Heuer @tagheuer
Talent Ryan Gosling, Vanessa Bayer
Director David Leitch @davidmleitch