Ryan Gosling Honours Eva Mendes While Accepting Award

Ryan Gosling shouted out his boo Eva Mendes while he accepted the Kirk Douglas Award for Excellence in Film, during the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

“Most importantly, I got to meet the girl of my dreams, Eva Mendes, and have two dream children. I dreamed of one day making movies, and now movies have made my life a dream. So the way I see it, there’s no way I’ve contributed half as much to cinema as cinema has contributed to me, but the idea that I might have given something back to the thing that has given so much to me is too great an honour for me to express.”

The couple share daughters Esmeralda (9) and Amada (7), and have been together since 2011. An insider revealed they are “as in love today as the first year they were together."

“She’s his No. 1 fan and loves it when he gets to do big movies, like Barbie. Ryan also supports Eva in all her endeavours and just adores her.”

While accepting the honour, Ryan also paid tribute to his mother, Donna. He called her "deeply instrumental" in helping him achieve success. 

“When I was in the third grade, I had a swearing problem. I didn’t think it was a problem, but my teachers did. My mother said it was almost impossible to get me to stop, but I remember the night she figured it out. We were at the dinner table and she said, ‘If you swear one more time, you can’t watch any movies tonight.’ And I thought that was extreme, so I used some extreme language back. She said, ‘OK, now you can’t watch movies for a week.'”

“Well, since she upped the ante, so did I. I hit her with a quick flurry of my favourites and then I dropped an F-bomb, just for good measure. She said, ‘OK, well, now you can’t watch movies for a month.’ It wasn’t until that exact moment that I realised just how much movies meant to me. It was the worst moment of my young life at that point.”

“She found my weak spot. She knew it, and soon after that she took me out of school and homeschooled me for a year. You know, with all the swearing and the not being able to read and write very well, I guess she figured that she couldn’t do much worse. So part of her curriculum was weekly visits to the library to check out books I had no intention of reading. She had a solution for that too. The library had a collection of films and she made a deal with me that for every book I read, I could rent a movie.”

The 15-minute speech was concluded when he gave one more shoutout to his mother. 

“Thank you to the Santa Barbara Film Festival for this very special honour and for letting me say all of this — and I did it all without swearing. Not even once. So I guess my mum was the big winner tonight.”