Celebrity
The Sweetest Things Ryan Gosling Has Said About Fatherhood & His Daughters
The actor has said that Eva Mendes is the “girl of my dreams,” who gave him “two dream children.”
Ryan Gosling made headlines ahead of the Oscars when he championed his Barbie director Greta Gerwig and co-star Margot Robbie after they were snubbed in their respective categories. He stood out in that moment, as he has increasingly done in the past few years, as a champion of women. While we hate to posit that perhaps he has been affected by becoming a father of two daughters, we also like to think that his daughters are enriched by the fact that their dad is someone who holds women up whenever he can. And will certainly hold them up as they continue to grow.
Gosling is dad to 9-year-old daughter Esmerelda Amada and 7-year-old daughter Amada Lee with his partner Eva Mendes. The couple have been extremely careful to keep their daughters out of the spotlight, with Mendes never sharing their faces on her Instagram feed and Gosling... well, he doesn’t really do social media so it’s not an issue for him.
Still, the actor has often spoken about his daughters in interviews, even going so far as to get vulnerable about how meeting Mendes changed the way he looked at becoming a dad. Here are some of the sweetest things he’s said over the years.
He didn’t want to have kids without Eva Mendes.
In a 2023 interview with GQ, Gosling admitted that Mendes, who he met on the 2011 film The Place Beyond The Pines, changed the way he looked at fatherhood. “When you asked me about Eva and kids, I think I said, I didn’t think about kids until she told me she was pregnant. That’s not really true,” he said at the time. “I didn’t want to overshare, but now I also don’t want to misrepresent. I mean, it’s true that 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.”
He acted more for his kids than anyone else.
During the Covid lockdowns, Gosling shared that he and Mendes were kept busy trying to keep their two daughters entertained. “Our kids are young, so it was a tough time for them to be separated from other kids and not being able to see family and whatnot,” Gosling told GQ in 2021. “So, we did our best to entertain them. I think Eva and I did more acting in quarantine than we have in our whole careers.”
He thanked Eva Mendes for supporting him while he worked.
When accepting a Golden Globe for his role in La La Land, Gosling was quick to call out all Eva Mendes had done to make it possible for him to star in the movie. “While I was singing and dancing and playing piano ... my lady was raising our daughter, pregnant with our second and trying to help her brother fight his battle with cancer,” he said in 2017. “Sweetheart, thank you. To my daughters, Amada and Esmeralda, I love you.”
He respected Amada’s “power move” at the Louvre.
When Gosling was with his family in Paris filming The Gray Man in 2022, they went to visit the Louvre, arguably one of the most impressive museums in the world. To everyone other than his daughter Amada, who gave the museum, and the Mona Lisa in particular, several aggressive thumbs-down signs. Not that he minded much. “I’m like a dad first,” he told Jimmy Fallon in 2022, “and part of the reason for doing the film [The Gray Man] was this opportunity for us to go to these interesting places and be there with my kids.”
Time flies when you’re a dad.
Gosling thinks often about time passing as a dad. “Time, in general, is something I think about a lot now,” Gosling told British GQ in January 2022. “My kids are growing up so fast. I need to keep an eye on the clock in a way I never used to.”
His daughter inspired him to play Ken.
When Gosling was trying to decide whether or not to play Ken in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, it was actually his daughters who helped to seal the deal. Simply because of the way they treated their Ken doll. “I did see him, like, face down in the mud outside one day, next to a squished lemon and it was like, ‘This guy’s story does need to be told,’ you know?” he told GQ in 2023.
His daughters have been his dance coaches.
When it came to learning his choreography for “I’m Just Ken,” Esmerelda and Amada were key to helping their dad prepare. “I had to practice a lot to do,” he told Extra TV last July. “They knew it better than I did by the time I was ready to do it because I had been working on it at home. So they came to set and they were behind the camera. My coaches.”
He looks to Mendes for advice.
Gosling admitted to GQ that he turns to Mendes whenever he has a question about parenting. “She knows what’s important, always,” he explained to the magazine. “She just somehow knows. So if ever I’m in my head about it, I just ask her.”
He teared up talking about his “dream children.”
During an acceptance speech at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, Gosling got emotional when he talked about everything film had brought him. “Most importantly,” he said through tears, “I got to meet the girl of my dreams, Eva Mendes, and have two dream children.”
He hears the parenting “clock ticking.”
While his daughters are still young, Gosling is certainly thinking about the future and wants to enjoy every moment he can with his family. “It’s going super fast. I hear the clock ticking,” Gosling told Variety in 2024, clearly thinking about the time with his daughters. “I don't know how much time I'm going to get and I don't want to spend it in the wrong place. I know I'm not spending it in the wrong place if I'm with family.”
Ryan Gosling is living his dream life with his dream girl and dream children. And we couldn’t be happier for this dreamboat.
