Ryan Gosling has admitted to doing it with his celebrated Barbie Role partly because of The influence of his daughters. But as it turns out, it was nine-year-old Esmeralda and eight-year-old Amada who were behind even more of the Oscar-nominated actor’s recent career choices.
In a new interview with WSJ. magazineGosling talks about family life with Eva Mendes and their two girls, noting that becoming a father has had a big impact on which characters he wants to play.
“I don’t really take on roles that put me in a dark situation,” he admits. “At this moment I want to try to read the room at home and figure out what will be best for all of us. The decisions I make are made together with Eva and we make them first with our family in mind.” “
Gosling believes that 2016 La La Land was the first film he chose with family in mind – which makes sense since his daughters were just babies at the time.
“Even if they don’t come to set, we practice piano or dance or sing every day,” he remembers. “It was just like, ‘Oh, they’ll enjoy this too.'”
This influence again extended to his decision to play Ken Margot Robbies Barbie in the celebrated blockbuster 2023 – it’s him openly admitted that while he was thinking about the role, he went into his backyard and found his daughters’ Ken doll thrown away in the mud.
“Her interest in Barbie and her disinterest in Ken were an inspiration,” Gosling says. “By the time it happened, they were already making little movies about their Barbies on the iPad, and the fact that I went to work to make one too, we just felt like we were on the same page.”
The actor’s upcoming film, The Guy case, is an ode to the Hollywood stuntman. And although Gosling only performed some of his own stunts in the film, he admits that his family father status influenced those moments too. He remembers how his “body turned to stone” before he was about to fall from a great distance – wearing a seatbelt, of course.
“I think that actually happened when I had kids,” he says of his increased caution on set. “You start to become much more aware of everything you do, everything you’ve ever done, and everything you’ll do if you get the chance.”
Beyond that frightening moment, however, Gosling says he embraced it The Guy case – for which he also acts as a producer – to prove that action films can also be light-hearted and entertaining, something that you can 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’ve realized that I have the opportunity to actually make the kind of films that made me love films.”
Gosling said much the same thing to ET when he and his co-stars starred Emily Blunt sat down to discuss the making of the epic meta film.
“Every day on set we were thinking, ‘What can we do to make people happy?'” he recalled at the time.
If everything goes as planned, Gosling, Blunt and director David Leitch would actually like to do it The Guy case a mini-franchise that follows in the footsteps of the 1980s television series it was inspired by.
“We already know exactly what the sequel is – we just wanted to know for ourselves what happened to these characters,” he says WSJ. “I hope the audience wants to see it.”
The Guy case hits theaters on May 3rd.
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