Ryan Gosling, 43, and Eva Mendes, 49, are tight-lipped about their private lives, and that generally includes their two daughters, Esmeralda Amada Gosling and Amada Lee Gosling.
While they don't share pictures of their daughters, the couple has shared stories about them — going back to the moment they knew they wanted to have children in the first place.
Gosling said the realization came when he was starring as Mendes' husband in their 2011 crime thriller, “The Place Beyond the Pines,” where they first met.
“I wasn’t thinking about kids before I met her, but after I met Eva, I realized that I just didn’t want to have kids without her,” he told GQ in 2023, adding, “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.”
Mendes said she "never wanted" children until this relationship. “I never wanted babies before until I fell in love with Ryan,” she said in 2020 on Australian radio show “Fitzy & Wippa.”
Mendes, in the same interview, said she was 40 and 42 when she had her children. "I had a career and then I changed my focus to my family,” she said.
Shifting her focus to parenting has been an adjustment, Mendes said. “People are so sweet — they really try to warn you, prep you, when you’re pregnant, but nobody can prep you. Nobody,” she explained to Kelly Clarkson in 2019 on the host’s daytime talk show, before listing the various jobs she juggles on the daily: “A chauffeur, a cook, a personal assistant to an abusive boss.”
But it's not all a slog. Read on for what else the couple has shared about their kids.
Esmeralda Amada Gosling, 9
After keeping Mendes’ pregnancy secret, the couple welcomed Esmeralda Amada Gosling into the world on Sept. 12, 2014.
“I’m completely exhausted. I thought my wild nights were over but these are some of the wildest nights I’ve ever had,” the then new mom told Violet Grey in an interview for a cover story back in 2014.
Mendes also shared the inspiration behind their firstborn's name.
“We were really excited about naming her,” she said. “Ryan and I both love the Esmeralda character from the Victor Hugo novel, ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ and we just think it’s a beautiful name. Amada was my grandmother’s name. It means ‘beloved’ in Spanish.”
In an interview with GQ magazine in May 2023, Gosling reflected on the moment Mendes broke the big news to him.
“Eva said she was pregnant,” he said, adding, “I would never want to go back, you know? 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.”
Amada Lee Gosling, 7
The couple’s second child, a daughter they named Amada Lee Gosling, was born on April 29, 2016. Mendes and Gosling again kept the pregnancy under wraps, with the public learning of their new addition just one month before the due date.
This was a challenging period for the expectant mother: Her brother, Carlos Mendes, died of cancer just 12 days before Amada was born.
“We had a funeral service for (Carlos) and that same week I had the baby. So it was really, really intense and obviously beyond heartbreaking, but also kind of beautiful,” the actress told Latina magazine for its September 2016 issue, per People.
In the same interview, Mendes shared the inspiration behind naming her second little girl Amada.
“My grandmother’s name is Amada,” she said. “We had a few names picked out for our new baby, and when she was born, we didn’t feel like those names were her. We came up with a few more, even that morning, and tried them out. We were like, ‘What about Viviana?’
“But we just kept going back to Amada,” she continued, adding, “In true Latin fashion, we reuse names all the time. I used to know five sisters that were all Maria del Carmen, Maria Elena, Maria Liliana … And it was an emotional time with the passing of my brother. We thought, How beautiful to go with what made us emotional and with what felt like her. When we looked at her, we thought, Aww, Amadita.”
What Ryan Gosling has said about his daughters
Gosling honored his wife and daughters in his acceptance speech at the 2017 Golden Globes, where he won for “La La Land.”
“While I was singing and dancing and playing piano ... my lady was raising our daughter, pregnant with our second and trying to help her brother fight his battle with cancer,” he said. “Sweetheart, thank you. To my daughters, Amada and Esmeralda, I love you.”
Beyond inspiring his speeches, his girls also inspire the roles he takes. Explaining his journey to becoming Ken in the 2022 “Barbie” film from director Greta Gerwig, Gosling told GQ that his daughters and their nonchalant disdain for Barbie’s male counterpart was the sign he needed.
“I did see him, like, face down in the mud outside one day, next to a squished lemon,” Gosling said, “and it was like, ‘This guy’s story does need to be told,’ you know?”
In July 2022, the actor went on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon“ to promote the pink-powered film and revealed that Amada has a bold maneuver that not even the Louvre in Paris is immune to.
“My youngest has a real power move,” he began. “We were standing in front of the ‘Mona Lisa,’ and she goes, ‘This museum?’” Gosling then mimicked his daughter giving a thumbs down. “I said, ‘Why?’” he said. “She went, ‘Because it is not good.’”
He added that she also flashes the old thumbs-down sign behind her back as she leaves a room sometimes. “The thumbs-down walk-away. It’s like, Roman Emperor level,” he said.
What Eva Mendes has said about her daughters
Mendes visited “The Kelly Clarkson Show,” revealing her “controlling” parenting style.
“I think what the term is — we’re always laughing at these terms — I think we would be ‘bulldozing parents,” she said. “We have to be on top of them every second ... The stakes are really high, so yeah, I’m a helicopter parent. And then I heard the bulldozing and I’m like, ‘Ooh, yeah, I’m probably a bulldozing parent too.’”
The mother of two wants her girls to know that no matter what, she'll always be there for them.
“I want my kids when they get in trouble later on in life … to be like, ‘I gotta call my mom versus, ‘Ooh, I can’t tell my mom about this,” she said on Instagram in February 2023.
She also wants them to challenge gender-specific stereotypes.
“I’m not an amazing cook — I leave that to Ryan,” the Skura co-owner told Forbes in 2022. “Hopefully it’s showing my girls that there are no gender-specific roles that one must take on.”
Mendes, whose resume includes fashion designer, might have met her match with Esmerelda.
“My 5-year-old cut her socks, the foot part off, and she likes to wear socks as sleeves,” she told People in 2020. “And the other day she wore underwear as a hat and I was like, ‘That’s amazing.’ I wish I could do that. I can’t.”
Always at the ready to drop nuggets of parenting advice, Mendes captioned her own head-shaking meme on Instagram in August 2023 with, “When my kids ask me if they’re old enough to go on the internet, social media or anything requiring wifi.”