For years, a collage of four images allegedly showing actors Macaulay Culkin and Ryan Gosling wearing T-shirts with images of each other printed on them has circulated online.
A January 2025 Facebook post (archived) with the images gained over 33,000 reactions and 790 shares, as of this writing.
The collage has appeared on social media platforms including Threads, Reddit, 9GAG, and
In short, while two images were authentic, two were digitally altered versions of photographs that originally depicted the actors wearing different, unrelated T-shirts.
Two images were authentic
The photograph in the upper left of the collage, which showed Gosling wearing a T-shirt featuring a photo of a young Culkin and the LIFE Magazine logo,
However, it was unclear who originally captured the photo. According to media outlets like the Daily Mail and HollywoodPQ, it was t
According to LIFE's photo archive, the image of Culkin on Gosling's T-shirt was taken in 1991 and depicts the actor "giving [a] choking expression at NBC Studios."
The photograph in the upper right of the collage, which showed Culkin wearing a shirt with the 2013 photo of Gosling, was also genuine.
The official X account for The Pizza Underground — a band that Culkin formed in
Two images were fake
The image in the collage's lower left, which appeared to show Gosling wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the 2014 photo of Culkin, was digitally altered.
A TinEye reverse image search revealed that the original photo was a cropped version of a frame from Gosling's 2013 film "Only God Forgives," directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. In the unedited photo, Gosling wore a plain white T-shirt.
(TinEye)
Finally, a TinEye reverse image search showed that the image in the lower right of the collage was also digitally edited.
While the origin of that image was unknown, early versions of it did not depict Culkin wearing a T-shirt with the fake Gosling photo mentioned above. Instead, those iterations showed Culkin wearing a red T-shirt with white text reading "Touch My Awesome Button." There was no evidence to confirm, nor deny, whether that version, too, had been digitally edited.
(TinEye)
Another digitally altered version of the 2013 gas station photograph of Gosling also circulated online. In that edited version, Gosling's T-shirt was edited to feature the real image of Culkin that The Pizza Underground's X account posted in 2014.
We have investigated other claims about