Ryan Gosling has one movie to thank for leading him toward fatherhood.
The actor told GQ in an interview published Wednesday that everything changed when he met Eva Mendes while filming Derek Cianfrance’s 2012 crime drama The Place Beyond the Pines.
“It’s true that I wasn’t thinking about kids before I met her, but after I met Eva, I realised that I just didn’t want to have kids without her,” Gosling said of Mendes, who is now his longtime partner.
“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,” he continued. “I realised that this would be a life I would be really lucky to have.”
The couple, who may or may not be married, has two young children.
Gosling, a former child actor who rose to stardom in films including 2004’s “The Notebook and 2011’s Drive, said he would “never want to go back” to his life before having kids. “I’m glad I didn’t have control over my destiny in that way, because it was so much better than I ever had dreamed for myself,” he told GQ.
Gosling was at the top of his game with an Oscar nomination for 2016’s La La Land and the leading role in the 2018 Neil Armstrong biopic First Man when he began a four-year absence from Hollywood. He has since returned with more mainstream projects like The Gray Man and the upcoming Barbie movie.
The actor told GQ he put the brakes on his career when Mendes had their second daughter and he “wanted to spend as much time” as possible with them.
He even chose his recent role in The Gray Man in part because it allowed him to take his family with him, he told Heat magazine last year, per the Daily Mail.
“You know it’s funny, we went to France and we went everywhere — we went to the Louvre and all these things,” he said in the 2022 interview. “And if I asked them now, ‘What was your favourite part about France?’ They will say, ‘The fruit plate at the hotel.’”