Ryan Gosling Says His Kids Have An “Aussie Twang” Thanks To Bluey

It’s not just you: even celebrity families are obsessed with Bluey. Ryan Gosling, Eva Mendes, and their daughters, Esmeralda and Amada love the show, so we have to imagine they enjoyed living in Australia while their dad was filming his latest movie The Fall Guy, co-starring Emily Blunt. But Gosling doesn’t think it’s actually living in the country that inspired their newfound accent.

“I think they got it from Bluey,” he confessed during an interview with The Project. (Blunt agreed.) “Every kid has an Aussie twang now.”

There’s a lot Gosling says he appreciated about living in Australia. Tim Tams (can confirm: they’re basically the perfect cookie/snack), coffee (“it’s on a whole other level”) and breakfast in general. But surely none of us can name a more beloved Aussie export than Bluey. Gosling and Mendes have been longtime fans, with Mendes even making a brief, two-line appearance as a yoga instructor in the Season 2 episode “Born Yesterday.”

“There is no such thing as small parts, there are only small actors!” she joked in a 2022 radio interview about the role. “Bluey, in our house, it’s like a Martin Scorcese film. It’s the epitome of entertainment. It’s such a beautiful cartoon though, it’s so soulful.”

This isn’t the first time a much-loved children’s show has influenced our children’s collective speech patterns. Parents also report that Peppa Pig prompted their toddlers and preschoolers to start speaking with a British accent.

In 2019, Roberto Rey Agudo, the language program director of the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth College and a public voices fellow with the OpEd Project told Romper that “Peppa accents” in the U.S. were prevalent “in part because Peppa Pig has been such a phenomenon with the 2 to 5-year-old crowd and it’s considered cute, whereas I don’t know what other shows have that kind of currency right now.”

Agudo also pointed out that, before a certain age, kids are just absorbing language: they’re not distinguishing accents as being different accents. It’s all just language to them. In fact, a study in The British Psychological Society found that 5 and 6-year-olds were not able to distinguish between different regional accents, but could identify accents different than their own.

Of course, Esmerelda and Amada are currently about 9 and 7, so this is probably more of a choice on their part but hey: when in doubt, choose Bluey.