The Oscar-nominated 'Barbie' star opens up about family life with Eva Mendes and their daughters in a new interview.
Ryan Gosling has admitted to taking on his celebrated Barbie role in part because of his daughters' influence. But, as it turns out, 9-year-old Esmeralda and 8-year-old Amada have been behind even more of the Oscar-nominated actor's recent career choices.
In a new interview with WSJ. Magazine, Gosling opens up about family life with Eva Mendes and their two girls, noting that becoming a father has had a serious impact on the kind of characters he wants to play.
"I don't really take roles that are going to put me in some kind of dark place," he admits. "This moment is what I feel like trying to read the room at home and feel like what is going to be best for all of us. The decisions I make, I make them with Eva and we make them with our family in mind first."
Gosling believes that 2016's La La Land was the first film he chose with family in mind -- which makes sense as his daughters were babies at the time.
"Even though they're not coming to set, we're practicing piano every day or we're dancing or we're singing," he recalls thinking. "It was just sort of like, 'Oh, this will be fun for them, too.'"
That influence again extended to his decision to play Ken to Margot Robbie's Barbie in the celebrated 2023 blockbuster -- he's candidly admitted that while considering the role, he walked into his backyard and found his daughters' Ken doll discarded in the mud.
"Their interest in Barbie and their disinterest in Ken was an inspiration," Gosling shares. "They were already making little movies about their Barbies on the iPad when it happened, so the fact that I was going off to work to make one too, we just felt like we were aligned."
The actor's upcoming film, The Fall Guy, is an ode to Hollywood stuntman. And while Gosling only performed some of his own stunts in the film, he admits his family man status also affected those moments. He recalls how his "body turned to stone" before a scene where he was supposed to fall from a significant distance -- while wearing a safety harness, of course.
"I think it’s happened when I had kids, really," he says of his increased caution on sets. "You start to be way more conscious of everything you do and everything you’ve ever done and everything you will do if you get a chance to do it."
Beyond that scary moment though, Gosling says he took on The Fall Guy -- on which he also serves as a producer -- in an attempt to prove that action movies can also be lighthearted and fun, something to be proud of as a father and family man.
"I think for so long I was just trying to pay the bills and work," he notes. "It's only recently that I feel like I realized that I have this opportunity to actually make the kind of films that made me love movies."
Gosling said much the same to ET when he and co-star Emily Blunt sat down to discuss the making of the epic meta movie.
"Every day on set, we thought, 'What can we do to just make people happy?'" he recalled at the time.
In fact, if things go as planned, Gosling, Blunt and director David Leitch would love to make The Fall Guy a mini-franchise, following in the footsteps of the 1980s television series it was inspired by.
"We already know exactly what the sequel is—we, just for ourselves, wanted to know what happened to these characters," he tells WSJ. "I hope that the audience wants to see it."
The Fall Guy is in theaters May 3.
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