Fans can’t get enough of Ryan Gosling in Barbie, but the actor teased that his Kenergy might be too much for his daughters to handle.
“I don’t know if you should watch your father as Ken,” Gosling, 43, told E! News at the 2024 Santa Barbara International Film Festival on Saturday, January 13. “I don’t know what age is a good age to see your father do that.”
He joked that his portrayal of Ken in the 2023 box office hit “gets pretty crazy.”
Despite not seeing the movie, Gosling, who shares daughters Esmerelda, 9, and Amada, 7, with partner Eva Mendes, noted that his girls were a part of his Barbie journey. “They’ve seen little parts of it,” he explained. “And they came to set one day when I did a big musical number.”
Gosling revealed that his daughters are fans of the iconic doll — even before their dad was the Ken to Margot Robbie’s Barbie.
“I knew that they loved it because they kept saying at first, ‘Hey, can we go to Target?’” he recalled. “And we go to Target, and then they’d slowly go by the Barbie aisle. And my wife and I sort of realized, ‘OK, I think it’s time to let them have Barbies.’ And no interest in Ken, which was pretty interesting, too.”
Ultimately, playing the life-sized plastic figure on screen was “a way to sort of make something both for and with them,” Gosling added.
The Oscar winner previously revealed that his kids don’t mess around when they play with their Barbies.
“My kids, their Barbies aren’t even named ‘Barbie.’ They all have their own names [and] very complicated lives, backstories, interrelationships, history — you gotta know it all,” Gosling told ET Canada in July 2023. “If you are playing with the two that are estranged now for some reason [and you did not know that], it’s like, ‘Get out of here.’”
The actor explained that the rules are hard to keep straight. “[The dolls] don’t even talk!” Gosling quipped. “And by the way, [Ken] works at a grocery store, he’s not a fireman. You gotta know [the story lines].”
While his daughters are more interested in playing with Barbie than watching it on the big screen, Mendes, 49, was always Team Ken.
“Eva is always supportive of the films Ryan takes on,” an insider exclusively told Us Weekly in August 2022. “She finds it cute and charming that he’s playing the role of Ken.”
Mendes fully embraced Gosling’s movie makeover, as well, which included bleach blond hair and a toned physique. “They were actually having fun role playing together after he went blond,” the source added. “They both got some good laughs.”
Ahead of Barbie’s summer 2023 premiere, Mendes teased her love of Ken by wearing a T-shirt with her partner’s movie character.
“Got that real big Kenergy. Coz girls is players too,” she wrote via Instagram in May 2023. In the series of snaps, Mendes rocked a white shirt that read, “Barbie 2023. Ryan Gosling as Ken.”
Two months later, Gosling paid homage to Mendes by wearing an “E” necklace to the Barbie premiere in Los Angeles. The letter was written in Barbie script and was pink to match his pink suit and shirt.
