Ryan Gosling Opens Up About Meeting Eva Mendes & Just How Lucky He Is

Although he’s usually very quiet about his personal life, especially when it comes to his family, actor Ryan Gosling recently opened up about his decision to have children with his partner, Eva Mendes.

“When you asked me about Eva and kids, I think I said I didn’t think about kids until she told me she was pregnant,” Gosling told GQ about a past interview with the magazine. “That’s not really true. I didn’t want to overshare, but now I also don’t want to misrepresent. I mean, it’s true that 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.”

Gosling revealed that it was during the production of The Place Beyond the Pines, a 2012 crime drama where Gosling and Mendes played the parents of an infant, that he knew having children with Mendes was something he wanted in real life. “I realized that this would be a life I would be really lucky to have,” he said.

In 2014, Mendes and Gosling welcomed their first child, a daughter they named Esmeralda. Two years later, their second daughter, Amada, was born.

In the past, Mendes, too, has said that she didn’t want children until she met Gosling. “I never wanted babies until I fell in love with Ryan,” she said. “It kind of worked out to where I was 40 and having my first baby.”

Last year, the couple had people wondering if they had secretly married when Mendes’ old tattoo that reads “de Gosling” began trending on social media.