Ryan Gosling and longtime partner Eva Mendes have kept their relationship and family life largely private, but in a new interview with British GQ, Gosling slightly pulled back the curtain on life with the actress and their daughters, 7-year-old Esmeralda and 5-year-old Amada.

Gosling told the outlet that his girls changed the way he views the passage of time. “Time, in general, is something I think about a lot now,” he said. “My kids are growing up so fast I need to keep an eye on the clock in a way I never used to.”

Asked whether the coronavirus pandemic affected that view, Gosling replied with a laugh, “You know, I’m not sure. I feel like I need more time to process it. But we have two kids [with Mendes], so we spend a lot of our time trying to keep them entertained.”

Quarantining presented a challenge for the couple because “our kids were at a difficult age not to be able to see other kids and interact with people, even though Eva and I did our best,” he said, adding he suspected they did “more acting in quarantine than in our films. Tougher crowd, though.”

ryan gosling and eva mendes in september 2017
Robert Kamau//Getty Images
Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes in September 2017

Mendes spoke to Access Daily in 2019 about her life as a parent with Gosling. “Oh gosh, it’s so fun and beautiful and maddening. It’s maddening,” she said. “It’s so hard, of course. But it’s like that feeling of like, really, you end your day, you put them to bed, and Ryan and I kind of look at each other like, ‘We did it, we did it. We came out relatively unscathed, you know?’”

“Right now, they have every bug,” she said of their daughters’ interests. “They just like a lot of arts and crafts, a lot of painting. We have instruments around. They pick them up, and we can’t say they actually play anything, but you know, it’s just a playful environment, and it’s a lot of fun but who knows?”

As for date nights with Gosling, “It takes a lot of prep [for a date night],” she said. “You have to make sure...you have it all lined up. But luckily, we have a lot of family support—a lot of family. My family lives here. His family comes in. They live in Canada, but they come in all the time and stay for a very long time, and it’s very welcomed. And so we have that support.”