Ryan Gosling Says His Two Daughters Don’t Understand Why He Would Want to Play Ken in ‘Barbie’ Movie

It’s here, it’s here, it’s finally here! This week is the week that Barbie finally hits theaters, and, with so much buzz, we’re pretty stoked to see it for ourselves at last. Just in case you’ve been under a rock, Margot Robbie plays the titular character, with Ryan Gosling alongside her as Ken in the Greta Gerwig-directed film. (If you haven’t checked out this sneak peek from the movie, you must; singing this ballad was actually Gosling’s idea, Marie Claire reported recently.)

People reports that his kids Esmeralda and Amada—who he shares with longtime love Eva Mendes—were confused as to why he would want to play Ken in the first place, since he didn’t play with Barbies himself growing up. “My kids were my introduction to [Barbie],” he said. “I think they’re confused as to why I would want to play Ken. They have no use for Ken.” 

His daughters also helped him prepare for a scene that required an extra amount of work, he told the outlet: “My kids were around for the months at home as I was prepping for it,” he said. “So they, inadvertently, were prepping for it, too. And they came to set that day and were a huge sense of support and doing it with me off-camera.”

Gosling and Mendes have been together for 12 years, since they met in 2011 while filming The Place Beyond the Pines. (Esmeralda is eight, and Amada is seven.) In the film, which premiered in 2012, Gosling and Mendes played a family, which led the actor to realize he wanted to start a family of his own with Mendes. “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 earlier this year.

“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,” Gosling added. 

The couple is fiercely private about their relationship and especially about their kids. “I have always had a clear boundary when it comes to my man and my kids,” Mendes said in 2020. “I’ll talk about them of course, with limits, but I won’t post pictures of our daily life,” she wrote on Instagram.

“Since my children are still so little and don’t understand what posting their image really means, I don’t have their consent,” she said. “And I won’t post their image until they’re old enough to give me consent.”