Ryan Gosling Calls Eva Mendes 'Girl of My Dreams' in Acceptance Speech

Ryan Gosling gave a sweet cry Eva Mendes while accepting the Kirk Douglas Award for Excellence in Film at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival on Saturday, January 13.

“The most important thing is that I met the girl of my dreams, Eva Mendes, and had two dream children,” the Barbie star, 43, said in his acceptance speech. “I dreamed of making films one day, and now films have turned my life into a dream. So as I see it, in no way have I contributed half as much to cinema as cinema has contributed to me, but the idea that I might have given back to the thing that has given me so much is too big an idea . honor for me to express.”

Mendes, 49, and Gosling share daughters Esmeralda, 9, and Amada, 7, and have been together since 2011. They are “just as in love now as the first year they were together,” an insider exclusively shared We weekly in May 2023.

“She is his biggest fan and loves it when he gets to make big movies like Barbie,” a source continued. “Ryan also supports Eva in all her endeavors and adores her.”

While accepting his honor at SBIFF on Saturday, Gosling also honored his mother, Donnawhich he called “very instrumental” in helping him achieve success and realize his deep love for films.

“When I was in third grade, I had a swearing problem. “I didn't think it was a problem, but my teachers did,” he said. “My mother said it was almost impossible to get me to quit, but I remember the night she found out. We were sitting at the table and she said, “If you swear again, you won't be able to watch movies tonight.” And I thought that was extreme, so I used extreme language. She said, “Okay, now you can't watch movies for a week.”

Gosling was angry with his mother. “Well, since she raised the bar, so did I. I hit her with a quick attack of my favorites and then I dropped an F-bomb just for good measure,” he recalled. “She said, 'Okay, now you can't watch movies for a month.' It wasn't until that moment that I realized how much films meant to me. It was the worst moment of my young life at that time.”

He revealed that his mother had also found a way to encourage him to watch more movies while also making sure he sharpened his reading skills.

“She found my weak spot. She knew, and soon after, she took me out of school and homeschooled me for a year. You know, with all the swearing and the fact that she couldn't read and write very well, I thought she couldn't do much worse,” he joked. “So part of her curriculum involved weekly visits to the library to pick out books I wasn't planning on reading. She also had a solution for that. The library had a collection of films and they made an agreement with me that I could rent a film for every book I read.”

Gosling concluded his 15-minute speech with another shout-out to his mother: “Thank you to the Santa Barbara Film Festival for this very special honor and for letting me say all this – and I did it all without swearing. Not once. So I think my mom was the big winner tonight.