Throughout her 16-year acting career Mendes was often typecast as the one-dimensional beauty — “there were some pretty shitty roles” — and received regular feedback that, as an American with Cuban heritage, she wasn’t right for the part. “That’s all they would say at the beginning — ‘she’s too ethnic for this, too ethnic for that,’ ” she recalls. “It was so crazy. That was the constant note. Then, at some point, it switched to ‘oh, ethnic is cool now’ or ‘being Latina is cool’. It gave me energy because it would make me so mad and then I’d get that fuel that I needed.” Now it sounds as if she would only return to acting for a project alongside Gosling: “That’s the one thing I would love to do.” – Sunday Times UK