The Barbie star shares daughters Esmeralda and Amada with The Place Beyond the Pines star Eva

Ryan Gosling’s performance as Ken in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie may have been the subject of immense acclaim, but the one thing that didn’t love him after the movie was his home with Eva Mendes.

The Canadian actor, 43, sat down with Variety for a new interview where he tried to guess lines from his most famous movies, and was presented with one from Ken, which read: “When I found out the patriarchy wasn’t about horses, I lost interest.”

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, Ryan spoke of his nerves about approaching the role. “It’s the hardest role I’ve ever had to play,” he admitted. “It was like a high-wire act in tiny shorts and no shirt – with no net.”

 “I was like, ‘I can’t mess this up. I can’t be the guy that messed up the Barbie movie’ … I Ken’d as hard as I could.”

Bringing his work home proved somewhat challenging, however.

“I had to get new sheets because of all the fake tanner,” he joked. “Just looked like a crime scene in my house. Just terrifying handprints on the wall. If you didn’t know, you’d just think I was a very disturbed…person that was living there.”

Ryan and Eva, 49, are the proud parents of daughters Esmeralda, nine, and Amada, seven, both of whom are pretty big fans of Barbie the Mattel doll (and its encompassing world).

In a previous interview with E! News, he revealed that the fact that the girls loved Barbie so much was a big reason why he took the comedic role on in the first place.

© Alamy Stock Photo
Ryan revealed that the fake tanner he used for Ken proved to be disastrous for his sheets at home

“I knew that they loved it because they kept saying at first, ‘Hey, can we go to Target?'” he told the outlet. “And we go to Target, and then they’d slowly go by the Barbie aisle. And my wife and I sort of realized, ‘OK, I think it’s time to let them have Barbies.’ And no interest in Ken, which was pretty interesting, too.”

While the Drive star shared that Esmeralda and Amada had been to the set and seen him perform a big musical number, they hadn’t actually seen the finished product yet, which ended 2023 as the highest grossing movie of the year and earned over $1.4 billion at the box office.

© Alamy Stock Photo
The actor is now Oscar nominated for his performance in the fantasy comedy

“I don’t know if you should watch your father as Ken,” he shared at the 2024 Santa Barbara International Film Festival. “I don’t know what age is a good age to see your father do that. It gets pretty crazy.”

Speaking with Entertainment Tonight last year, he did add, though, that despite not having seen the film, his daughters were his test audience for the full Kenergy, and he knew that if they weren’t laughing, it was time to step up.

© Starpix/REX/Shutterstock
Ryan and Eva share daughters Esmeralda and Amada

Still, he admitted back in July at the movie’s world premiere: “Well, it was, I think, weird enough for them that I played Ken anyway. I might like, you know, just hold off on them seeing the full Ken energy.”