Ryan Gosling is learning his part

Ryan Gosling knows the father he wants his daughters to have. Becoming that person is harder. “You just want to be everything they deserve,” he said. The wish did not erase his flaws. It made him more aware of them.¹²

When Esmeralda was two and Amada was a baby, he worried they might inherit qualities he struggled with in himself. Discovering that they were separate people brought relief. His job, as he saw it, was to learn who they were and work out what they needed.¹³

The father who comes home

By 2024, that responsibility was affecting the jobs he chose. Gosling said he was avoiding roles that would take him into a dark psychological place, because he wanted to remain available to his family afterward. He and the girls’ mother, Eva Mendes, made those decisions together. He traced the change back to La La Land: even when the children were not on set, the music and dancing could be part of life at home.¹²

After their second daughter arrived, Gosling stepped away from films to spend time with his family. In 2023, he said he aimed for about one film a year because they traveled with him. Home supplied the interest he once sought elsewhere. When unsure as a parent, “I just lean on Eva,” he said.³

For one daughter’s birthday, relatives flew in and Gosling took on the cooking. By the next day, he estimated that he had made more than thirty pizzas and forty espresso drinks.³

The family had help beyond the two parents. Mendes credited both grandmothers and the couple’s sisters with getting them through the early years. Later, she described her mother and sisters arriving with food, cooking rice and washing whatever dishes were in the sink. Gosling had been delighted by everyone joining in. For Mendes, the busy kitchen recalled her own Cuban childhood.^{14, 21}

Their arrangement also had to make room for what Mendes wanted. She did not want to be away from the children for months, but still wanted to work. Finding a way to do both had taken thought and conversation. They had choices to make together.⁵

The arrangement worked both ways: Gosling stayed home with the girls when Mendes worked, and her care for them made his work possible too. “I couldn’t be here without her.” Before The Fall Guy, Mendes and the children had also made a request about his stunt work: they did not want him set on fire. They had opinions about the work that took Dad away.⁶

He does not know all the rules

When the girls were small, they thought their father’s job was more extraordinary than acting. They visited the First Man set while he was filming a launch scene in a spacesuit. Mendes said the visit left them believing he was an astronaut. Gosling later recalled his older daughter pointing at the moon and asking whether that was where he worked.^{16, 17}

Gosling’s daughters had invented lives for their dolls, and he had learned the details. A doll named Darrell worked at a grocery store. Another, named Gym Class, had met Darrell there, although Gym Class was concentrating on herself for the moment. Gosling could recount their names, jobs and relationships because he had been following his daughters’ game.¹

His casting as Ken puzzled the girls for a different reason. Gosling said the doll was “such a nonpresence in their world.” In their games, the characters they had invented had more interesting lives than Ken.¹

Playing Ken in Barbie did not make him an authority on that world. “I’m not sure exactly what my place is in the game,” he admitted. He could make a living pretending and still feel unsure playing with his children. The uncertainty had not kept him from joining them.²

During the pandemic, he and Mendes had tried to fill some of the space left by friends and relatives the girls could not see. At bedtime, they acted out stories and gave the characters different voices. Gosling joked that the couple had done more acting in quarantine than in their careers.⁴

Mendes’s account of those days included the aftermath: once the children were asleep, the adults cleaned up and compared notes. She said they reminded each other that they were together and safe when things felt overwhelming. The entertainment and the clearing up belonged to the same evening.⁸

The family also protected parts of the girls’ lives from public view. In 2020, Mendes said she would not post their images until they were old enough to consent. After the family attended the Paris Olympics in 2024, she thanked the broadcaster for not cutting away to the children and the outlets that had blurred their faces.^{20, 19}

Books remained part of their evenings as the girls grew. Mendes described reading picture books with them before sleep when they were eight and ten. They still enjoyed being read to, and she valued the chance to settle down together and let a conversation grow from the story.¹⁵

What he hopes to pass on

He and Mendes knew the frustration of trying to choose a film all four of them could enjoy, especially a live-action one. Making Project Hail Mary was partly a response to that gap. Making movies might be their family business, he said, “but we want to go to the cinema too.”⁹

When he spoke about Project Hail Mary in 2026, Gosling had more in mind than making something the girls could watch. He wanted them to encounter a hopeful way of thinking about the future. He was drawn to a story in which fear could lead to curiosity and practical effort. “Turn anxiety into curiosity,” he said.⁹

He let the girls’ ideas affect the film itself. While he was trying different looks for his character, one daughter told him, “You look smarter in glasses.” That was what the character needed, so the glasses stayed. “It matters to me what they think,” he said.⁷

The girls had watched several cuts of the film. “They’ve given me many notes,” Gosling said. When he filmed scenes with the alien Rocky, he sometimes heard his daughters playing the alien through an earpiece. Another performer supplied Rocky’s voice in the finished film, but Gosling said some of his laughter on screen came from reacting to his girls.^{10, 11}

The Spanish they were learning was part of their mother’s family history. Mendes, whose parents are Cuban, said her own mixture of English and Spanish was what the girls picked up. She recalled a daughter complaining about a sore mouth in an English sentence with the Spanish words for mouth and tooth mixed in.¹⁸

The girls called him Papi, with a slight accent as they learned Spanish. “It kills me every time,” he said. For all his thought about the father they deserved, being called their dad still undid him.¹²