Ryan Gosling’s press tour for Barbie has been one wild ride, and he got pretty personal in a recent cover story for GQ. The Oscar-nominated actor opened up about his relationship with Evan Mendes and explained how having her in his life changed his outlook on parenthood.
Gosling and Mendes met while filming The Place Beyond the Pines in 2011, and they’ve been together ever since. The couple now has two daughters together – Esmeralda, born in 2014, and Amada, born in 2016 – and Gosling couldn’t imagine raising them with anyone but Mendes.
“I wasn’t thinking about kids before I met her, but after I met Eva, I realized that I just didn’t want to have kids without her. And there were moments on The Place Beyond the Pines where we were pretending to be a family, and I didn’t really want it to be pretend anymore,” the actor told GQ.
Mendes also previously revealed that having kids was “the furthest thing from [her] mind” before she met Gosling. She discussed motherhood with Women’s Health in 2019, and told the magazine that having kids only made sense after she fell in love with the Canadian actor because she wanted to have “not kids, but his kids.”