Ryan Gosling is very convincing as astronaut Neil Armstrong in First Man. In fact, the star is so believable that his and Eva Mendes’ daughters Esmeralda, 4, and Amada, 2, believe their dad travels 238,900 miles to get to work.
It all started when the girls popped by the set and watched 37-year-old Gosling shoot a scene. “I was in a space suit and pretending to launch,” Gosling explained on the Wednesday, October 3, episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! “I think they think I’m an astronaut now. My oldest said the other, she pointed to the moon and she was like, ‘That’s where you work, right?’”
The Notebook actor also opened up about attending his mother Donna Gosling’s recent wedding in Italy. “These wonderful older Italian women [kept] whispering to me about food,” Gosling recalled. “At one point, this woman said, ‘There’s a tortellini in the freezer!’ Then later on, almost towards the vows, another woman said, ‘There’s a smoked mozzarella in the fridge,’ and another woman went, ‘It’s from Naples!’”
According to the Mickey Mouse Club alum, the mozzarella lived up to its hype. He described it as tasting like “an angel crying on your tongue.”
The Canada native and Mendes, 44, were first linked in September 2011 after they worked together on the Place Beyond the Pines.
Gosling raved about the Hitch actress on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in June. When he suffered a concussion on the set of First Man, it was Mendes who convinced him to go to the emergency room.
“I went home one night and I called Eva, and I was just hellbent on this idea that there were people in doughnut stores all around the world that were trying to charm their way into getting free doughnuts,” he quipped. “She was so patient and listening. She was like, ‘I’ve been saying you have brain damage as a joke, but I think you might have brain damage. I think you should go to the hospital.”
First Man opens in theaters on Friday, October 12.
