“We weren’t throwing Ming vases at each other, so it wasn’t loathing, but our relationship was not what you saw on the screen. I would say that we were both, well, professional,” McAdams said in 2013 of the pair’s on-set relationship.
“[Our later relationship] certainly wasn’t something that either of us had expected would come out of that filmmaking experience,” McAdams would later tell The Times of the couple dating after not exactly getting along during filming, “which goes to show you that you can engineer chemistry on-screen just by telling the audience that these two people love each other…as an actor you don’t have to feel it. You don’t have to feel anything. Just imagine it.”
Of course, fans started shipping Gosling and McAdams just as much as they did Noah and Allie, with their infamous on-stage makeout session when accepting the award for Best Kiss at the 2005 MTV Movie Awards going down in awards show (and pop culture) history.
“I don’t know what happened,” Gosling later admitted of how they went from cordial co-workers to boyfriend-girlfriend. “Two years later I saw her in New York and we started getting the idea that maybe we were wrong about each other.”
Gosling and McAdams would go on to date for three years, before breaking up for good in 2009. And while neither star ever officially discussed their break-up, Gosling opened up about their epic romance to GQ.
“God bless The Notebook. It introduced me to one of the great loves of my life,” he said. “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…the only thing I remember is we both went down swingin’ and we called it a draw.” (Um, can we get this movie?)
And fans were pretty devastated when the couple split for good, with Gosling admitting to the magazine, “Women are mad at me. A girl came up to me on the street and she almost smacked me. Like, ‘How could you let a girl like that go.’ I feel like I want to give people hugs, they seem so sad. Rachel and I should be the ones getting the hugs! Instead, we’re consoling everybody else.”