“So many people, even my friends in high school, were like, it’s never going to amount to anything. It’s just lost hope and fleeting dreams. And thankfully they were wrong,” A.J. McLean of the Backstreet Boys told The Huffington Post during an interview to promote the band’s new documentary, “Show ‘Em What You’re Made Of.” After selling more than 130 million albums worldwide and becoming the best-selling boy band in history, those high school friends, including Ryan Gosling, were certainly wrong.
You might have been an avid fan of the group while growing up — learning their songs during piano class and having the Burger King action figures of the band from when they did a Marvel comic, for instance — but probably haven’t given too too much thought to the Backstreet Boys since. If that’s the case, the documentary is a surprisingly satisfying deep look into the band’s early days and current status. Funny stories and pictures are shared, the trivia is often crazy (the band watched porn together) and relationship dynamics you really should have picked up on as a tween obsessive seem to be presented honestly for the camera. The documentary, directed by Stephen Kijak, isn’t just a weak nostalgia trip, but legitimately compelling. Backstreet’s back, all right?
HuffPost spoke to both McLean and Kevin Richardson, the oldest member of the band — who joined after working as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and Aladdin at Disney World — both of whom explained some key moments from the Backstreet Boys past. Ahead, eight stories you’ve never fully heard before about the boy band that was larger than life (not sorry):
1. Ryan Gosling was almost in the Backstreet Boys when they were first starting out.
As you should remember, Gosling used to be a Mouseketeer. (Looking back at those early tapes with Justin Timberlake, it’s certainly hard to see him later beating a man to a pulp in “Drive.”) Gosling — along with other Mouseketeers — used to live in the same rent-controlled building as McLean, who invited Gosling to be in McLean’s new band one day on the basketball court. As McLean explained:
Basically, when I first moved to central Florida from south Florida, where I was born and raised, I was living in this apartment complex along with Britney Spears, Ryan Gosling and two other Mouseketeers. […] My apartment was literally adjacent to a racquetball-slash-basketball court, so I was out there everyday after school shooting hoops. Ryan and I became friends just playing basketball together. Literally right around that time is when I went through the audition process and I was the very first Backstreet Boy to ever be put in the group — which was actually in 1992.
McLean was the “OG Backstreet Boy,” the original member, and he was now recruiting:
So, once the group was actually formed, we were still looking for a fifth member. I know I had jokingly mentioned to Ryan one day on the basketball court that I was in this group and I knew that he sang and he was on the Mouse Club. I threw it out to him and then he kind of didn’t really say, yay or nay — he just kind of nodded and was like, “Huh.” Obviously he was already in Mouseketeers so why would he bite the hand that feeds him? Then, next thing you know, within the next few years, things kind of took off.
Ryan Gosling would later tell Celebuzz in 2013 that he thought this new boy band would be too much like New Kids on the Block. In the end, Gosling admitted he was “wrong” not to join the group.
“It would have been very very different if Ryan Gosling was in the Backstreet Boys I would have to say,” McLean added. Gosling started his own band in the late 2000s, Dead Man’s Bones, which actually ended up being pretty good.
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BSB loved their fans, but at times it certainly got a bit intense…
In an interview with MTV Buzzworthy, the band was asked about the weirdest or craziest fan moment. Brian Littrell responded, “Some fan stuck a knife under Nick Carter’s hotel room to see if he was in there!” McLean elaborated, “Some girl slipped a note under his door, and he went to reach for it and all of a sudden a knife slipped in!”
Another time a fan stowed away in their bus and offered the band something she really shouldn’t have, as Littrell explained in that MTV interview:
After performing in Hamburg, Germany, we had these two women sneak in to our tour bus. Our manager was looking for his bag, he reached for his backpack and felt something weird and it was the girl’s knee! We drove a couple hundred miles with them hiding there!
McLean also chimed in for this one: “The [same] German girl that stowed away on the bus,” he said, “she gave us two gold rings that turned out to be her parents’ wedding rings!”
The Backstreet Boys certainly loved and love their fans, but talking with them, you certainly get the sense that maybe, just a few times, it was just a bit too much. Richardson explained:
There were always fans getting on the floors and knocking on our doors throughout the night. Especially in Spain and America, there’d be like 10,000 to 15,000 fans outside the hotel, singing our songs all night, through the night. I mean, I’m talking until 5 a.m., they were singing, serenading us under our hotel windows as we were in our room. And that, that was beautiful and amazing and at the same time it was really weird.
All images Getty unless otherwise noted.
