Eva Mendes Says She Hopes Her Return to Movies Also Features Ryan Gosling

Though, unlike many of her peers in Hollywood, she isn’t photographed on red carpets every other weekend, Eva Mendes has been keeping busy. She’s still designing her long-running clothing line for New York & Company, and has also eagerly taken on a role as a self-described “helicopter parent” to daughters Esmerelda and Amada. Still, she hasn’t been onscreen in the past few years and doesn’t currently have any film projects lined up; in a new interview, Extra found out what — or who — it would take to get Mendes back in front of the camera.

“I’m excited to go back to work, it’s just not, like, I’m dying to do a movie again, so it has to be something really special,” Mendes told the outlet. When asked which director or costar would make her “sign on in a heartbeat to work with,” she instantly replied, “Ryan Gosling,” her longtime partner. The two costarred in 2012’s The Place Beyond The Pines and Mendes also starred in Gosling’s 2014 directorial effort Lost River (her most recent IMDb credit), so it’s not clear if she’d like her partner to be her costar or director (or both?), but she’s definitely up for a collaboration.

In the case of their other collaborations — their daughters — Mendes is definitely the director. She told Extra that, between her and Gosling, she’s typically the parent who has to enforce the rules. “There’s that term ‘helicopter parent,’ but aren’t you supposed to be a helicopter parent?” she said. “I’m strict about what they eat, and what they wear, and what time they go to bed. And what they watch. So, yeah.”

Family is a major priority for Mendes, who revealed that old family photos helped inspire her latest clothing and accessories collection. “My grandmother — who I never met, who we named our little girl after, Amada — we have some beautiful photographs of her from ’20s Cuba,” she said. “So I take a lot of inspiration from her and the jewelry she wore, the dresses she loved, a headpiece, and that’s where I get my inspiration from.”

Um, think we found your next project! The story of a fashionable Cuban woman named Amada in the 1920s, starring Eva Mendes, directed by Ryan Gosling, viewed by all of us. The Oscars await.

Related: Ryan Gosling’s Kids Think He’s an Actual Astronaut