Eva Mendes was MIA during this past award season and did not accompany Ryan Gosling to the Oscars and other ceremonies. And it appears there are two reasons why.
"What people don't know about me is that I love being home," Mendes told Shape magazine, which features her on its April 2017 cover. "Instead of hitting the red carpet, I'd rather be with our girls."
The actress and her longtime partner are parents of Esmeralda, 2, and Amada, 11 months.
In her interview with Shape, Mendes talked about how motherhood has taken a bit of a toll on her fitness regimen.
"I have two babies now, two girls, and before I had them, I actually ran a lot more," Mendes told Shape. "I used to really love to run."
"But I've always been into light weights," she added. "I really respond to weights and I feel like if I just do cardio, I don't get the results that I want. So it's very, very important for me to add weights into my workout. So I do a lot of jumps, squats—a lot of squats—lunges, and then intervals of like, sprinting within that. I have a really amazing person I work with, a trainer."
Mendes and Gosling are notoriously private and have never brought their kids to public events. They have, however, sometimes talked about their daughters in interviews.
"My grandmother's name is Amada, and Esmeralda Amada is the name of our oldest," Mendes told Latina magazine last year. "We had a few names picked out for our new baby, and when she was born, we didn't feel like those names were her. We came up with a few more, even that morning, and tried them out. We were like, ‘What about Viviana?' But we just kept going back to Amada."
She also said she and Gosling are are immersing their daughters in her Cuban culture as much as possible.
"We're constantly playing Cuban music," she said. "I speak to them in Spanish, and my mom speaks to Esmeralda in Spanish. Well, now she speaks to both of them in Spanish. Any time I have an opportunity to introduce her or them—I have to say ‘them' now, though my newborn just sleeps all the time—to my culture, whether it's through music, or through food, I do."