Celebrity power couple Eva Mendes and Ryan Gosling know the value of their privacy. The duo, who’ve managed to give birth to two daughters away from the public eye, are not ones to discuss their private life with the media.
But Mendes has finally broken her silence in a rare interview with Latina magazine. In it, the Cuban-American star opens up about welcoming her second daughter, Amada Lee, the same week she lost her older brother, Carlos, who passed away from cancer in April.
“Losing my brother brought our family closer, and we were already close to begin with,” Mendes told Latina magazine. “So to just see everybody be there for one another and show up, I feel so lucky to have them. And then they were there for me when Amada was born. We had a funeral service for him and that same week I had the baby. So it was really, really intense and obviously beyond heart-breaking, but also kind of beautiful.”
And the 42-year-old star is still sorting through those mixed emotions: “Being totally honest, I don’t feel like I’ve really processed that yet.”
Still, it was the loss of her brother that inspired the name of baby Amada Lee, who happens to share the name with her 2-year-old sister Esmeralda Amada and her great-grandmother. Mendes said she decided to reuse the name in true Latino fashion. The actress shares her own first name with her mother, Eva.
“I actually told Ryan, ‘This is common in Latin culture, so it wouldn’t be crazy,’” she said. “So we went with Amada because it was something we kept going back to. And it was an emotional time with the passing of my brother. We thought how beautiful to go with what made us emotional and with what felt like her. When we looked at her, we thought, ‘Aww, Amadita.’”
Check out the star on the cover of the magazine’s September issue and read more about her conversation with the publication here.
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