Eva Mendes Revealed the ‘Most Asinine Thing’ She Was Told While Pregnant at 40

Eva Mendes can’t imagine having children in her twenties.

In a new interview with People, the 50-year-old actor and entrepreneur opened up about the benefits of waiting until her forties to start having children. Mendes first met her husband Ryan Gosling, 43, in 2011 while filming The Place Beyond the Pines. They welcomed their first child, Esmeralda, in 2014 and their second, Amada, in 2016.

“When I was 40, it was a big deal for people when I was pregnant, and it wasn’t for me,” Mendes told the outlet. “And then I was 42 and I was pregnant with my second one and people were like, ‘Oh my God, you’re going to be so tired. That’s why people have kids in their 20s.’ I was like, that’s the most, sorry, asinine thing I’ve ever heard.”

Mendes says raising young children in your forties and fifties just “takes more patience,” but that she feels as if she “shouldn’t have even been around a child” in her twenties. “I was just foul-mouthed and smoking,” she explained. “I could not have raised kids in any other era of my life but now, for sure.”

When it comes to stepping back from Hollywood to raise her children, Mendes said it was “the easiest decision I’ve ever made,” adding, “Your career comes and goes but kids, yeah, that was easy for me. They’re just formative years. I wanted to be there for all of it.”

This interview comes after Eva Mendes clarified recent comments about her so-called “nonverbal agreement” with Gosling that she would take a break from acting while he continues to dominate the big screen. “That got—not twisted, but taken out of context because I meant it was almost a no-brainer,” she recently told Glamour. “But there was actually obviously a lot of thought and conversation—especially on my end—of what I wanted to do with my life. It was very clear to me that I didn’t want to be away from the kids. Acting takes you on location for months. But I still wanted to work. So I had to get creative about what that work was going to be.”

For the record, Gosling has also changed the way he considers his career choices. “I don’t really take roles that are going to put me in some kind of dark place,” he said in a new interview with 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.”

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