“It kills me every time.”

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Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes keep their family life out of the limelight. However, the couple can’t help but gush about their two daughters Esmeralda and Amada. In a new interview with the Wall Street Journal, Gosling spoke about his daughters and the way they’ve changed his life—including the sweet nickname they’ve given him, which has a Spanish flair, thanks to Mendes’s Cuban-American background. Gosling revealed that he goes by “Papi” in their household, which means “daddy” in Spanish.

“It kills me every time,” he said, referring to when the 8 and 9 year olds use the name. “There’s just nothing, nothing better than that.”

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His name isn’t the only thing that the girls have left their mark on. Despite being an Oscar-nominated actor, this Ken’s job, first and foremost, is being a dad. That means taking his daughters into consideration when choosing which roles to accept. For instance, playing the plastic doll in the 2023 blockbuster behemoth that was Barbie was a no-brainer, because his daughters already loved playing with Barbies.

“Their interest in Barbie and their disinterest in Ken was an inspiration,” he said. “I thought, 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.”

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Since becoming a father, he has also vowed to only take on parts that don’t affect his life at home. He no longer signs on to movies that negatively impact his psyche in fear that he wouldn’t be able to shake that mindset after they’ve wrapped for the day.

“I don’t really take roles that are going to put me in some kind of dark place,” he told the publication. “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.”

Films like La La Land felt like a perfect fit for the dad, because his research meant playing piano and singing with the girls.

“It was just sort of like, ‘Oh, this will be fun for them, too, because even though they’re not coming to set, we’re practicing piano every day or we’re dancing or we’re singing,'” he said.

The same goes for stunts. Gosling is much more hesitant now about performing risky moves on set.
“I think it’s happened when I had kids—really, 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,” he said.