Ryan Gosling: I Passed Out Girl Scout Cookies to Strangers

USMagazine, Thursday, January 10, 2013, 5:20pm (PST)

Ryan Gosling has some unusual hobbies.

The actor, 32, made an appearance on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live! Jan. 9 to promote his new movie, Gangster Squad. While there, the host, 45, asked Gosling to confirm or deny a story his friends had been sharing for the past "five or six years."

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"My friend Daniel and his wife, Diane, said that they were about to get on the freeway in Santa Monica, and you pulled up next to them and handed them several boxes of Girl Scout cookies and then drove off," Jimmy Kimmel said. "And as you drove off, Daniel said, 'I think that was Ryan Gosling,' and his wife said, 'Yeah, I think that was Ryan Gosling.'"

"So was that Ryan Gosling?" Kimmel asked.

Looking around the room, Gosling finally admitted, "It seemed like a good idea at the time. Yeah, look, I regret it."

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Eva Mendes' boyfriend then provided the backstory for why he passed out sweet treats to strangers. "When I was a kid, my dad he had side businesses all the time, and somehow -- I don't know how -- he came upon a truck full of cellophane . . . and he wanted me to help him sell it," Gosling recalled. After failing to make a profit from his classmates and teachers, the actor decided to sell the product outside of his local supermarket.

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"I had a fantasy that one day someone would buy all of it. Like some guy would come along and be like, 'I'll take it all!' Which never happened," Gosling lamented. "So I was walking out of Ralph's one day and these kids were trying to sell their cookies, and I was like, 'I'll take 'em all!' I bought hundreds and hundreds of boxes. I didn't realize how many boxes I was going to have. I had a car full of them and I didn't know what to do, so I started throwing the out the window to people on the street."

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Gosling continued, "Don't celebrate that. At the time I thought, 'This must be what Santa Claus feels like!' . . . And then I looked at this one person who was looking at me and I realized, through their eyes I was not Santa Claus -- I was just a creepy cookie guy. 'What happened to the Girl Scouts? What happened to their cookies?'"

Jimmy Kimmel Live! airs weeknights at 11:35 p.m. on ABC. Gangster Squad is in theaters Friday, Jan. 11.

This article originally appeared on Usmagazine.com: Ryan Gosling: I Passed Out Girl Scout Cookies to Strangers