Nearly a decade after she largely left Hollywood behind, Eva Mendes is sharing insights about her decision to step away from acting—and one star who could bring her back to the screen. “I was never in love with acting,” she told the U.K. Times in a recent interview. “I don’t mean this in a self-deprecating way, but I wasn’t a great actress. I had my moments when I worked with really great people.”
The now 50-year-old Mendes, best known for roles in Oscar-winning drama Training Day, romantic comedy Hitch, and action comedy The Other Guys, said her identity as a Cuban-American often led to being typecast as one-dimensional characters. “There were some shitty roles,” she recalled. “That’s all they would say at the beginning—‘she’s too ethnic for this, too ethnic for that.’ It was so crazy. That was a constant note. Then, at some point, it switched to, ‘Oh, ethnic is cool now’ or, ‘Being Latina is cool.’ It gave me energy because it would make me so mad and then I’d get that fuel that I needed.”
While working on 2012’s crime drama The Place Beyond the Pines, Mendes found love with costar Ryan Gosling, with whom she later welcomed two daughters—10-year-old Esmerelda and 8-year-old Amada. Mendes’s final onscreen role (outside of a voice acting credit on a 2021 episode of kids program Bluey) came as a supporting player in Gosling’s 2014 directorial debut, Lost River. When asked about professionally reuniting with her real-life partner, Mendes said, “That’s the one thing I would love to do. He gets something out of me that’s never been accessible before.”
Back in March, Mendes told Today that leaving acting “was like a no-brainer,” adding, “I’m so lucky if I could have this time with my children. Acting takes you on location. It takes you away.” Instead, Mendes has devoted herself to projects in the fashion and beauty spaces, and recently wrote a children’s book. She’s also advised Gosling on his acting career, including 2023’s Barbie, which earned him an Oscar nomination. “I would just simplify everything,” Mendes said to the Times of her coaching. “I’m like, ‘Just make Barbie notice you, that’s what Ken is all about.’ So then there was this desperation. He really loved that.”
For his part, Gosling previously said that he chooses films with the input of Mendes. “I don’t really take roles that are going to put me in some kind of dark place,” he told The Wall Street Journal in May, adding that he selects roles by “trying to read the room at home and feel like what is going to be best for all of us…. The decisions I make, I make them with Eva, and we make them with our family in mind first.”
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