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Video: Ryan Gosling Finally Eats His Cereal As Tribute To Cancer Victim
If you've been keeping up with your Internet memes, you probably know that Ryan Gosling won't eat his cereal, that is—until now. In a Vine video posted by the actor yesterday, Gosling finally poured himself a bowl of cereal and ate it as a tribute to Ryan McHenry, the creator of the popular Vine video meme "Ryan Gosling Won't Eat His Cereal", who lost his fight against osteosarcoma (a type of bone cancer) on Sunday at age 27.
McHenry, a filmmaker from Glasgow, Scotland, began posting Vine videos in 2013 that feature a spoonful of cereal slowly approaching an on-screen Ryan Gosling who seems to retreat from the offer of breakfast:
Somewhere around the eighth video McHenry posted—each featuring a cereal-wary Gosling in a different film—the series went viral. Later that year, McHenry was diagnosed with osteosarcoma and found that documenting his experience and support from his rapidly expanding audience from the Gosling videos, helped him to cope with his cancer battle. In addition to the Gosling videos, McHenry created very personal Vines from his hospital bed while receiving cancer treatments. In a 2013 interview, he told The Verge:
"A lot of my positivity has come down to knowing that I’ve got a small audience out there," he says. "I kind of feel like I need to be positive for them. If I was on my Twitter or on my Vine being really negative, like ‘this is the worst thing ever, this is horrible,’ it just wouldn’t be nice for people to hear."
He also remained hopeful that Gosling would respond with a video of his own:
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"As a filmmaker, I like to have a conclusion to things," he says. "The only conclusion I can see out of this whole thing is to have Ryan Gosling respond to this. Even if it’s just him eating cereal."
As McHenry's Vine series grew in popularity, Gosling himself did respond a few times, though mostly via Twitter. Just last month he declared that he actually loves cereal, and told McHenry—we're assuming jokingly—that he would never forgive him for creating the meme.
We're actually pretty sure that Gosling was joking, as just yesterday the actor posted the following video to Vine, in which he finally eats his cereal as a thoughtful tribute to McHenry.
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