Ryan Gosling has a movie to thank for leading him to fatherhood.
The actor said GQ in an interview revealed on 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 didn’t think about kids before I met her, but after meeting Eva I realized I just didn’t want kids without her,” Gosling said of Mendes, who is now his longtime partner is.
“And there were moments in ‘The Place Beyond the Pines’ where we were pretending to be family and I didn’t want to pretend we were family anymore,” he continued. “I realized that I would be really lucky to have this life.”
The couple, who may or may not be married, have two young children.
Gosling, a former child actor who rose to fame in films like ‘The Notebook’ (2004) and ‘Drive’ (2011), said he would “never want to go back to his life” without having children. “I’m glad I wasn’t in control of my destiny in that way because it was so much better than I ever dreamed of,” he told GQ.
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Gosling was at the peak of his career, with an Oscar nomination for 2016’s “La La Land” and starring in the 2018 Neil Armstrong biopic “First Man,” when he began a four-year absence from Hollywood. He’s 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 wanted to spend “as much time” with them as possible.
In fact, he chose his most recent role on The Gray Man in part because it allowed him to take his family with him, he told Heat magazine last year. according to the Daily Mail.
“You know, it’s funny, we went to France and we went everywhere — we went to the Louvre and all those things,” he said in the 2022 interview. “And if I were to ask her now, ‘What did you do like best about France?’ They’ll say, ‘The fruit platter at the hotel.’”
