In her early twenties, before finding fame as a Hollywood actress, Eva Mendes visited Europe for the first time. Specifically Manchester. “I loved Mancunian bands. Oasis. The Smiths. Joy Division,” she says. “It was an amazing music scene and I had the best Indian food I’d ever had in my life. I was sold.”
Fast-forward almost 30 years and Mendes is back in the UK, wearing a leopard-print bucket hat that Liam and Noel would surely appreciate and buzzing that the Gallagher brothers are reuniting. “I can’t even talk about how incredibly excited Ryan and I are about this. Are they going to the States? I feel like they might,” she says, recalling the first time she saw Oasis in Los Angeles way back when.
Indeed, the actress turned entrepreneur is on her way to becoming a fully fledged Anglophile. For the past four months she and her partner, Ryan Gosling, plus their daughters, Esmeralda, ten, and Amada, eight, have been living in west London. “We’re in Notting Hill, so we have access to those communal gardens. Seriously, it’s magical,” she says, adding that she has made some good British mum friends too. Meanwhile, Gosling, the bankable movie star of Barbie and La La Land fame, has been filming Project Hail Mary, a sci-fi movie about an astronaut, at Shepperton Studios in Surrey.
Florida-born and California-raised, Mendes has only one complaint about the UK: predictably, it is the climate. “I love how you guys are so up for talking about the weather and the first ones to know that it’s s*** weather.”
We meet on a typically mizzly September afternoon in a Notting Hill hotel. She arrives slightly late, having rushed from a fitting with Stella McCartney. Along with the British pop star Raye, Mendes is the face of McCartney’s winter 2024 campaign, called It’s About F***ing Time. “It’s really Stella’s focus on Mother Earth and a call to action from her,” she says. “Supporting another woman who I adore felt great.”
Immediately warm and fizzing with “anxious energy”, as she puts it, Mendes is far happier to talk about her heart-throb partner and their family than I’d anticipated. Now 50, she doesn’t appear a day older than she looked in her acting days, even though it has been a decade since her last film, Lost River, which was Gosling’s (panned) directorial debut. “I’m not afraid to try things that are safe, because most of these little treatments, let’s say, are reversible,” she says of her beauty regime. “If you get Botox, it goes away if you don’t like it. There have been times where I’ve regretted something … and then you just wait it out.”
Mendes’s big hits as an actress included Training Day (2001, in her breakthrough role playing Denzel Washington’s mistress), Hitch (2005) and The Other Guys (2010), before she starred opposite Gosling in The Place Beyond the Pines (2012). In 2014, the same year she had her first child, she walked away from Hollywood.
“I was never in love with acting. 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,” she says, adding that she is proudest of the two films on which she worked with Gosling, now 43. “He gets something out of me that’s never been accessible before.”
Throughout her 16-year acting career Mendes was often typecast as the one-dimensional beauty — “there were some pretty shitty roles” — and received regular feedback that, as an American with Cuban heritage, she wasn’t right for the part. “That’s all they would say at the beginning — ‘she’s too ethnic for this, too ethnic for that,’ ” she recalls. “It was so crazy. That was the 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.” Now it sounds as if she would only return to acting for a project alongside Gosling: “That’s the one thing I would love to do.”
Occasionally, she gives acting coaching to Gosling, who has starred in films nonstop since finding global adoration with The Notebook 20 years ago. For example, when he was working on Barbie, playing Ken opposite Margot Robbie. “I would just simplify everything. 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,” Mendes says. “I’d remind him, as he’s literally walking out the door, ‘Make Barbie notice you, make Barbie fall in love with you.’”
The couple have never publicly spoken about getting married and last appeared on the red carpet together in 2013, while promoting The Place Beyond the Pines. Though Mendes will occasionally post her support of his movies on Instagram — “There’s times where I cannot keep this to myself. This is just so incredible,” she tells me.
Similarly, Gosling recently wore a T-shirt while he was being interviewed that was emblazoned with the title of Mendes’s new children’s book, Desi, Mami, and the Never-Ending Worries. Its story involves a mother helping her young daughter manage her anxiety; the first-time author describes herself as a lifelong nail-biter (“down to the skin”) who had a happy but hectic childhood. “I was raised in a loving home, but it was really chaotic,” Mendes says.
She grew up with her mother, Eva Perez Suarez, and her older siblings, Janet, Becky and Juan Carlos, in Los Angeles. Her parents, who had moved to the States from Cuba in the 1970s, separated when she was young. (She also has a younger, paternal half-brother, Carlo.) “I love my dad, but he wasn’t as present and as much of a support as he should have been,” she says. “My mum did it by herself and we were all in a tiny apartment.” The three eldest siblings shared one bedroom while Mendes and her mother, who worked various jobs, including as a bank teller, shared a bed in the second bedroom. “She did a really beautiful thing when I was about 13 — she started sleeping on the couch and gave me the bed,” she says, suddenly full of emotion.
The family remains close-knit. In 2016 Mendes’s older brother died from cancer aged 53. She recalls viewing his body and then sitting, heavily pregnant with her second child, alone in her room. “I thought, ‘This is what heartache is. I felt broken. F*** all the other things that you know of heartbreak. How we think of it, or see it in the movies, read about it … this is such real heartache.” She typed ‘heartbreak’ into her Apple music and the Bee Gees’ How Can You Mend a Broken Heart came on. “I must have listened to it 20 times in a row, that obsessively, and I just let it all out, sitting there with my baby that I knew he would never meet.”
It was Juan Carlos who had kept Mendes, who was more than ten years younger, on the straight and narrow while she was at Herbert Hoover High School. “He’d say, ‘If I ever see you out there with a guy or smoking, I’ll f***ing kick his ass and take you to school every day,’ ” she says, smiling. “By sheer fear I was a good kid.”
After dropping out of university to pursue acting, she had her wayward stint later on. “It’s really stupid. I started smoking cigarettes at 28. And then I started drinking. I was a late bloomer,” she says. In 2008, just as her career was taking off, Mendes went to rehab in Utah; now she doesn’t touch alcohol. “I feel like with my kind of spirit I’d have found unhealthy behaviours anywhere,” she says, refusing to pin blame on her showbusiness surroundings. “I was so hungry for life. I still am. But I was leaving no stone unturned. I was like, ‘What’s over here? What’s over here?’ ”
These days it’s clear that her main focus is motherhood. She talks enthusiastically about “conscious parenting” (which is about focusing on the parent-child relationship rather than following rules) and namechecks various child-rearing manuals she has enjoyed. “I still have all this anxiety and I see myself passing it on to my children,” she says. “Subconsciously I can’t imagine what they’re inheriting from me that I don’t want them to inherit from me.”
Her daughters are home schooled; social media and smartphones are forbidden. “Putting my kid on the internet and being like, ‘Oh, search something,’ that to me is equivalent to telling her, ‘Oh, just go down the street in the middle of the night. You’ll be fine,’” Mendes says. “I know that sounds extreme, but that’s what I feel.”
Her current reading is Raising Mentally Strong Kids by Dr Daniel G Amen and Charles Fay, which has helped her navigate bringing up children in a life of privilege vastly different to her own. “I explain to them what I didn’t have, what Ryan didn’t have when he was little, how hard we had to fight, the dark days of being paycheque to paycheque, and this and that, but they’ll never really know unless they experience that,” she says. “The next best thing [to gain perspective], according to Dr Amen, is to really have them work on their self-esteem for themselves by doing things like working in the house.”
Mendes’s own mother instilled in her the importance of financial independence. “She’d be like, ‘If you want real freedom, you have to find a way to make your own money.’ That’s as simple as it is. I had my marching orders from my mom and I set out to do that,” she recalls.
Since leaving acting she has designed clothes for the American fashion brand New York & Company, modelled for Estée Lauder and, from 2022, has been the co-owner of Skura Style, a company making cleaning products. “I still have the same level of ambition as I had before. It just has shifted,” she says.
As well as showing her young daughters that “working is cool”, she is conscious to not pass on any physical insecurities, so she never talks negatively about her body, weight or ageing in front of them. Plus, she makes everyone, including her beloved sisters, stick to that rule: “I’m not going to be able to control this narrative much longer. They’re getting to that age.”
For herself, Mendes seems relatively sanguine about having turned 50 in March. “It was totally fine. It’s just that number sounds crazy,” she says. “I feel like a girl inside and I’m like, oh my God, I’m not a girl any more.” She has noticed becoming “extra spacey” in midlife. “I forget everything. I think that’s part of being 50. I think I’m looking down the barrel of hormonal changes.” She laughs about her jaw getting “funky” and contemplates getting it lasered with the latest technology.
There is a clear self-confidence to Mendes and she lights up when I ask her whether she feels sexy. “I feel really f***ing sexy at times,” she says, grinning. “The way my man looks at me is just … at times I’m like, oh my God. That might not sit well with people, but so much of how I feel is a reflection of what he’s giving me.”
I try to move on but she’s on a roll. “There’s so many things that can make me feel sexy and I’d say that I feel more sexy than not. I guess because I’ve never considered myself beautiful, but I’ve always felt very sexy.”
A reluctant exerciser, she lifts weights and does cardio a few times a week: “I have the worst attitude about it, but I do it.” She also cleans. “When my house is out of order, I’m out of order completely,” she says, insisting that she doesn’t run one of those pristine homes where biscuits must be eaten over the sink. “No, it’s not like that at all. I actually love a good spill.”
While cleaning the kitchen with old-school Cuban music blasting is her beat, Gosling does most of the cooking. “He’s an amazing cook, an incredible baker. I love his shakshuka, it’s mouthwatering,” Mendes says, before rhapsodising about his fruit pies. “He’s full-on, he flutes his own pastry.” Now that’s sexy.
Desi, Mami, and the Never-Ending Worries by Eva Mendes (St Martin’s £16.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
Hair: Kei Terada at Julian Watson Agency using Ouai. Make-up: Genevieve Herr at Sally Harlor using Lancôme. Nails: Emily Rose Lansley at The Wall Group using Bio Sculpture. Local production: Amelia Heritage for Town Productions
