Ryan Gosling Talks Fatherhood

Ryan Gosling is on the cover of January's GQ Magazine. Here are some highlights from the accompanying interview:

On fatherhood:
“Your whole life, you hear what it's like to have kids, and all the clichés are true. I felt I knew that everything would be different, but until you experience that, there's no way to really know what people mean...I only know what it's like to have my kids. And in my situation, Eva's the dream mother, and they're dream babies, and it's like a dream that I'm having right now. I'm dreaming it all. So I feel so lucky.”

On whether or not he thought fatherhood would feel like this:

“It's not something I really thought about, or even thought I wanted. I didn't have a romanticized idea of it.… It came about in a very surprising and kind of organic way. There was nothing kind of premeditated about it, you know. It just suddenly was: My life had changed. And thank God it did.”

On the pressure to be a good father after coming from a broken home:
“Sure, yeah. I mean, not leading up to it, but now. When you meet your kids you realize that they deserve great parents. And then you have your marching orders and you have to try and become the person that they deserve.”

On his childhood:
“I just felt this sense of: I have a limited amount of time and, you know, I've got to get started. I also didn't like the arbitrariness of control that people seemed to have over me. I think most kids don't know to question that. They just accept it. I think my mother encouraged that. I had one teacher, because I was dancing, he thought that was funny and he would make jokes about it in class, and my mother said, ‘You know, if ever you feel like he's being disrespectful, you can just leave.’ And I did one day. I called her and said, ‘Hey, I left.’ Also, when I was homeschooled for a year, I saw my curriculum come in the mail, and I saw that it was just this tangible stack of books—I guess I realized that there were other ways to do it. The fact that I could stay home and watch Planet of the Apes in the morning and then go downstairs and draw while I learned about some historical battle—draw these maps and scenarios and connect to it in a way that was personal to me—I just felt like: Oh well, then there must be another way to do everything.”

On empathy:
“Like, when I saw Dumbo and The Elephant Man—I felt like those films were smashing down some wall inside of me and creating a room called empathy. And being very grateful for having seen those films even though they were painful, and the idea of watching them again was scary, because I didn't know that I wanted to feel those things again, but it did feel different after seeing them. Like they had exposed some part of myself to me that I didn't know was there...I don't know why I put them together. But I guess I remember feeling for both of those characters.”

Read the full interview at GQ.