Ryan Gosling has claimed that he always has his family in mind when selecting roles these days.

The three-time Oscar nominee is a dad to two daughters, nine-year-old Esmeralda Amada and eight-year-old Amanda Lee, who he shares with his long-term partner Eva Mendes.

While Ryan has plenty of hard-hitting roles in his back catalogue, including the neo-Nazi drama The Believer and the violent action drama Drive, he’s said that more recently, he’s leaning towards lighter projects, so he can be more present with his family after a day’s shooting is over.

“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.”

Ryan claimed this shift began with the musical La La Land, with subsequent projects including the Neil Armstrong biopic First Man, sci-fi sequel Blade Runner 2049 and, of course, Greta Gerwig’s hit Barbie movie.

“It was just sort of like, ‘oh, [La La Land] will be fun for them, too, because even though they’re not coming to set, we’re practicing piano every day or we’re dancing or we’re singing’,” he explained.

“Their interest in Barbie and their disinterest in Ken was an inspiration […] they were already making little movies about their Barbies on the iPad when it happened, so the fact that I was going off to work to make one too, we just felt like we were aligned.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Ryan spoke about performing a stunt in his new comedy The Fall Guy, when he was suddenly hit with a fear of heights.

“I think it’s happened when I had kids – really, you start to be way more conscious of everything you do and everything you’ve ever done and everything you will do if you get a chance to do it,” he added.

Before Barbie’s release, Ryan made no secret of the fact that his daughters’ own indifference towards Ken led to him saying yes to the Barbie film.

He told The Tonight Show: “I walk out in the backyard [after getting the offer] and, do you know where I found Ken. Face down in the mud next to a squished lemon.

“I texted [the photo] to Greta and said, ‘I shall be your Ken, for this story must be told’.”

Read Ryan Gosling’s full interview in WSJ magazine here.