Only God Forgives Poster

Don't panic. Ryan Gosling has not been at the centre of some awful bar scrap. Nor is this the result of him getting too close to a flailing Sean Penn in Gangster Squad. Instead, one man has done this to him, and that man is Nicholas Winding Refn. Well, actually, his make-up team did it for Only God Forgives. Check out the pic below. It's in keeping with the film's plot, which finds Gosling as a boxing gym-owning crime lord who seeks vengeance for his brother's murder. But tracking down those responsible is one thing – actually getting his revenge takes a lot more doing. Filming in Thailand, Gosling learned Muy Thai boxing for the role, and clearly he needed to perfect it a little more than he did. All right, so the script called for him to get badly beaten up and this is all movie magic. But it's certainly an interesting – and, let's face it, very Refn-style approach to marketing a film. Take a man considered by man to be among the most handsome of Hollywood's current crop and present him as a mangled mess. Still, given that it represents a reunion of the Drive team, we're still anticipating this one with all due excitement. Only God Forgives arrives on US screens on May 23. There's no word on a UK date just yet.