20 Years Ago, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams Performed The Notebook Kiss at the MTV Movie Awards — And I’m Still Obsessed (Exclusive)

There are a few things that — when they appear on my social media feeds — I am unable to scroll past without watching them: Tom Holland dancing to Umbrella; any time Chicken Shop Host Amelia Dimoldenberg and Andrew Garfield encounter one another; thirst trap edits of Captain Von Trapp; but most importantly of all, there is the 2005 MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss between Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams.

Summer 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of this particular slice of pop culture history, and an important event for millennials like me.

The first time I watched The Notebook, I was in my first year of university and along with five other girls squeezed into my friend’s room, lined up in a row on her single bed. Anticipation was high as we gathered around a laptop screen and together, we laughed and swooned and cried our eyes out. It was a perfect moment of girlhood. When the two stars kissed in the rain, we applauded, rewound and watched the scene over and over.

That summer at the MTV Movie Awards, something magical happened. Ryan and Rachel (rightly) won the best kiss award, but then they performed the kiss onstage — only better. And it turned out, they were a couple in real life. Reader, we lost our minds.

It’s hard to overstate how invested we all were in this relationship, and when — almost two decades later — my agent asked if I had any ideas for my next novel, I knew just the thing.  “I’ve been thinking a lot about the 2005 MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss,” I wrote. What followed was a heated exchange in which we pored over every delicious detail.

The shared, secret little smile when the winners are announced. The matching black blazers that get removed. McAdams’ hitching her bodice. Gosling off to the side limbering up. The Darfur T-shirt. The chewing gum. The way he crooks his finger at her! The legs around his waist! The hand in her hair! The cut to Lindsay Lohan looking as delighted as we all feel! The could-not-be-more 00’s soundtrack. The way she holds on to him. The way he says, “It was my pleasure.” How he picks up her jacket on the way back.

Just talking about it had us giddy. And it wasn’t just the kiss itself that felt tantalizing. It was the lore. In 2014, a decade after the film came out, director Nick Cassavetes gave an interview in which he revealed that initially, the atmosphere on set was tense, that the co-stars didn’t get along and that things culminated in an argument that had the pair “screaming and yelling” at each other. But a year later, they were in love. They dated from 2005 to 2007.

Enemies to lovers? A second chance romance? The potential for a romance writer was irresistible, and so the kiss that melted my heart as a teenager became the inspiration for my upcoming novel, Let’s Make a Scene. It’s the story of two young actors, Cynthie and Jack, and while the on-screen chemistry between the pair is undeniable, behind the scenes of their first film, it’s war. Thirteen years later, they come together again to make a sequel and to find out how fine the line between love and hate really is. I even put in my own Best Kiss moment, my favorite scene in the book and a love letter 20 years in the making.

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