Ryan Gosling, "Creepy Cookie Guy," Tells of Handing Out Sweets to Strangers

Gangster Squad jokes to Jimmy Kimmel he felt like Santa Claus after helping out Girl Scouts, but regrets impulsive purchase because of looks he got

By Rebecca Macatee Jan 10, 2013 9:30 PMTags

Nobody's perfect, but Ryan Gosling comes pretty damn close.

Once upon a time, Hollywood's Prince Charming bought out some lucky little lady's entire haul of Girl Scout Cookies, then handed the sweets out to strangers on the road. On Wednesday's Jimmy Kimmel Live, the funnyman got Ryan to explain his endearingly charitable feat.

Jimmy explained that "five or six years ago," two of his friends encountered the Gangster Squad star in Santa Monica, Calif., and the actor "handed them several boxes of Girl Scout Cookies and then drove off."

Ryan begrudgingly confirmed that it was him, but told Jimmy, "It seemed like a good idea at the time…Look, I regret it."

Jimmy laughed at Ryan, then asked why he would regret his kind (albeit a little kooky) act. The empathetic Notebook star explained that his impulse buy was inspired by one of his own dreams as a kid.

"When I was a kid, my dad had all these side businesses all the time, and somehow, I don't know how, he came upon a truckload of cellophane....And he wanted me to sell it—to help him sell it," he said.

From there, a young Ryan took the plastic wrap "to school in my backpack, trying to sell it to the kids at school; I'm trying to sell it to my teachers, and then when I couldn't get rid of it, I thought I'd go outside of the supermarket and I'll just wait until people with their food [come out] cause they're gonna need to wrap it..."

"But anyway, I had a fantasy that someday someone would buy all of it," he explained. "You know, like some guy would just come along and be like, 'I'll take it all.' Which never happened. So, I was walking out of Ralph's one day and I saw these kids trying to sell their cookies, and I was like, 'I'll take 'em all.' So I bought hundreds and hundreds of boxes."

"I didn't realize how many boxes I was gonna have!" he said. "I had a car full of them. I didn't know what to do. So I started just like throwing them out to window to people on the street."

"Don't celebrate that," he said, laughing. "Because at the time, I thought, 'This must be what Santa Claus feels like!' I'd pull up to people at the stoplight and just throw cookies. And then I looked at this one person who was looking at me, and I realized like through their eyes I was not Santa Claus, I was just a creepy cookie guy."

"Like who is this guy," he imagined them saying. "What happened to the Girl Scouts and why does he have all their cookies? I regret it."

Ryan quipped that he "still has a bunch" of cookies left.

Yum.