Once every few months for the last two decades, the same somewhat-grainy 30-second clip is discovered anew. In it, Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling saunter toward one another across a stage as Maroon 5’s She Will Be Loved plays. They have just won the MTV Movie Award for best kiss in The Notebook — but their impassioned recreation of the kiss seems a lot more popular online than the original.
Nothing is more human than indulging in nostalgia for a simpler time — an era before social media or DeuxMoi sightings, where an onstage kiss between co-stars turned real-life couple held true novelty. If the clip isn’t committed to memory just yet, it goes something like this:
Before accepting the honour for 2005’s best on-screen lip lock, Gosling and McAdams remove their respective black blazers from opposite sides of the MTV Awards stage. She adjusts her strapless corset top as he beckons her closer. Gosling then hoists McAdams into his arms for a steamy kiss, as she wraps her legs around his torso. The camera pans to Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff, once apparent sworn enemies, who are united in their overjoyed reactions. Gosling visibly chews gum as he carries McAdams to the podium, where his-and-hers golden popcorn trophies await them. In lieu of an acceptance speech, Gosling offers a perfectly timed, “It was my pleasure.”
Nick Cassavetes directed his mother’s performance as an Alzheimer’s sufferer in the 2004 film
McAdams and Gosling’s victory was no surprise. Their stiffest competition that year was Garden State’s Natalie Portman and Zach Braff, another cinematic relic of early-aughts romance. But the way they accepted the award shocked even those running the live broadcast. “We just hoped that they’d do something fun,” MTV producer Joel Gallen, who directed that year’s show, told The Ringer in 2022. “They had this 10-second kiss and the place went nuts. I don’t even remember what they said after that. It was just this electric moment.”
It would’ve been far easier for the pair to play it cool. At the time, Gosling was on the precipice of his first Oscar nomination, McAdams was riding high on the success of Mean Girls, one of MTV’s most-awarded films that year. (It tied with Napoleon Dynamite, if you can believe it.) At the time, Gallen said, not even the show’s producers knew they were actually dating — meaning that the onstage kiss served as what we’d now call their relationship hard launch.
The MTV Movie Award for best kiss has long served as a time capsule. Inaugural honours, bizarrely enough, went to My Girl’s Macaulay Culkin and Anna Chlumsky, who accepted the award with a sheepish, “Gee, my first kiss and I get an award.” (Their fellow nominees ran the gamut from Anjelica Huston and Raúl Juliá in The Addams Family to Juliette Lewis and Robert De Niro in Cape Fear. Pure chaos!) Subsequent recipients included everyone from Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore for The Wedding Singer to Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger for Brokeback Mountain, as well as Twilight co-stars and former couple Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart — who claimed best kiss honours four years in a row, from 2009 to 2012.
Although Pattinson and Stewart never locked lips while accepting, others did — before and since McAdams and Gosling. Selma Blair and Sarah Michelle Gellar shared a small peck after winning for 1999’s Cruel Intentions, as did then-couple Chase Stokes and Madelyn Cline, who won for their Netflix series Outer Banks in 2021. When Jim Carrey and Lauren Holly won for Dumb and Dumber in 1995, they also publicly acknowledged their off-screen romance, with Holly telling the crowd, “Jim Carrey really does kiss like that — you should see the way he makes love.”
But it is the fascination with McAdams and Gosling’s PDA that persists. Perhaps that’s because of broader nostalgia for The Notebook, which celebrated its 20th anniversary this year and recently spawned its own splashy Broadway musical. Maybe the clip serves as a reminder of the co-stars’ unlikely love story — the film’s director Nick Cassavetes once disclosed that Gosling and McAdams didn’t initially get along on set. Earlier this year, he apologised for exposing their rocky beginnings, telling Entertainment Weekly, “They fell in love and became a wonderful, wonderful fiery couple.”
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Gosling and McAdams, who dated from 2005 until 2007, have not spoken much about their eternally viral stunt. When asked backstage at the MTV Awards about what makes for a superior on-screen kiss, Gosling told Entertainment Tonight, “You have to be born with a magic mouth. Me not so much. But some have said about Rachel she’s kind of [to kissing] what Jimi Hendrix was to the guitar.”
These days, the awards — which were cancelled this year due to the Hollywood strikes — have lost most of their lustre. Last year’s best kiss — which was well and truly sponsored by Cheetos — went to Outer Banks’ Madison Bailey and Rudy Pankow, neither of whom showed up to collect their prize. But we’ll always have the kiss between Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling, who, in 2007, blamed the end of their relationship on the pressures of “show business.”
Even then, Gosling knew the allure of their off-screen love story would endure. “God bless The Notebook,” the actor told GQ that year. “It introduced me to one of the great loves of my life. But people do Rachel and me a disservice by assuming we were anything like the people in that movie. Rachel and my love story is a hell of a lot more romantic than that.”
This story originally appeared on Vanity Fair.