Ryan Gosling’s Heart Just Melts When His Daughters Call Him By This Sweet Nickname

When Ryan Gosling played a Cuban “Papi” on a recent Saturday Night Live skit, he was eerily good. For good reason. He has been a “Papi” to his two daughters for nine years, and he simply cannot get enough of it.

The Fall Guy actor shares 9-year-old daughter Esmerelda Amada and 8-year-old daughter Amada Lee with his wife Eva Mendes, and he opened up about his life at home with his girls in a recent interview with WSJ Magazine. Gosling explained that his daughters are learning to speak Spanish, and they’ve taken to calling him “Papi” with sweet little accents. “It kills me every time,” Gosling told the outlet. “There’s just nothing, nothing better than that.”

Perhaps his love of being called “Papi” by his daughters might have inspired his hilarious SNL skit alongside cast members Kenan Thompson and Marcello Hernández, where he played a white man who married a Cuban wife and suddenly started talking like a Cuban “Papi.” A skit Mendes, who is Cuban American herself, shouted out on Instagram. “My Cuban Papi made this Cuban Mami so happy with this!! Years of hanging out with my Dad paid off,” she proudly wrote on Instagram when she shared a clip of the moment. We wonder if his own daughters were proud of their “Papi” too.

Gosling also talked about how he chooses his roles these days as a proud “Papi,” explaining that he has hit a stage in his life when he veers away from darker roles that might make him a different kind of partner and father at home. “I don’t really take roles that are going to put me in some kind of dark place,” he told WSJ Magazine. “This moment is what I feel like trying to read the room at home and feel like what is going to be best for all of us. The decisions I make, I make them with Eva and we make them with our family in mind first.”

This decision to focus on movies that make him feel better when he’s at home ended up becoming a bonding experience for Gosling and his daughters, particularly where his role as Ken in Barbie was concerned. Gosling’s daughters helped him learn the choreography for his Oscar-nominated song “I’m Just Ken,” so much so that he admitted to Extra TV that “they knew it better than I did by the time I was ready to do it because I had been working on it at home.”

What can he say? He’s a dedicated “Papi.”