Despite their star status, these actors, comedians, and musicians (and one prince!) think fatherhood is the best job.
Jimmy Fallon
Justin Timberlake
“I can’t wait to see our greatest creation yet,” said Timberlake at the iHeartRadio Awards, just weeks before the April birth of son Silas with wife Jessica Biel. “Daddy’s heading home right now to innovate by learning how to change a poopy diaper and get my swaddle on!”
David Beckham
“He tells me to park around the corner, and then he gets out and he walks around to his school,” the soccer star told Jimmy Kimmel in January about his 16-year-old son, Brooklyn. “So he did it to me the other day, after doing it about five times on the trot. So I’m driving around, and he’s just walking in his school, and I open the window and I said, ‘Brooklyn! I love you!’ And, you know, obviously it didn’t go down very well.”
Ashton Kutcher
“When you first get them … you’re all excited, and you’re ready to do all these things,” the new dad to daughter Wyatt said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2014. “Then you realize it’s like getting a new cell phone where all the features don’t work yet. It’s like a phone [that] won’t take pictures, and you’re like ‘Why won’t my phone take pictures?!’ And it won’t make calls, and it doesn’t do a lot. But it looks really cute!”
Ricky Martin
“‘Dad, was I in your belly?’ and I told him, ‘You were in my heart and you are still in my heart’,” said Martin in a 2014 radio interview explaining how one of his twin sons questioned his origins. (Sons Matteo and Valentino were born via surrogate in August 2008 to the single dad.) “So I explained further, because I couldn’t just leave it at that: ‘There was a woman that I adore with all my heart that helped me bring you into this world. She lent me her belly so that you could come and when you were born she put you in my arms.’ And he said, ‘ah, ok’ and he kept playing.”
Taye Diggs
“The most ridiculous thing I have heard myself say is, ‘Do you want your pop-pop, your banky or your baba?'” Diggs said in 2011, about his then two-year-old son Walker with former wife Idina Menzel. “Translation: ‘Do you want your pacifier, your blanket or your bottle?'”
Dave Grohl
“When you have kids, you see life through different eyes,” the Foo Fighters frontman and dad of three told Time in a 2010. “You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate.”
Mario Lopez
“No matter what drama I deal with at work, when I get home and hear them scream, ‘Daddy!’ I forget whatever it was I was stressed about,” Lopez told People in 2014 of daughter Gia Francesca, 4, and son Dominic, 1, with wife Courtney. “The hardest part of my new life as a dad is leaving for work in the morning. These kids have totally changed my life. They are simply fantastic!”
Prince William
“I did the first nappy, it’s a badge of honor,” the Duke of Cambridge told CNN after wife Catherine gave birth to their first child, George, in 2013. “I had every midwife staring at me, saying: ‘You do it, you do it.'”
Now a father of two, including daughter Charlotte, the royal says becoming a dad has made him a lot more emotional. “I never used to get too wound up or worried about things,” he said in an interview for a British TV documentary on his family. “But now, the smallest little things, you well up a little more, you get affected by the sort of things that happen around the world…a lot more, I think, as a father.” Will also revealed that, as a parent, he has some anxieties about his children growing up without a father. “You realize how precious life is and it puts it all in perspective,” he said.
Ben Affleck
“They’re most important in my life,” Affleck said in Us Weekly in 2013 about his kids Violet, 9. Seraphina, 6, and Samuel, 3, with wife Jennifer Garner. “Family is a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do other stuff in your life. In fact, having a family makes whatever other thing you have that much richer.”
Hugh Jackman
“The things that I really cherish are the everyday moments, like sitting around cooking pancakes together on Sunday morning, or getting home after a tough day and my kids come up and give me a hug and remind me what’s really important,” Jackman told Parade of being a dad to daughter Ava and son Oscar with wife Deborra-Lee Furness.
Ryan Reynolds
“We could end wars if we just carpet-bombed places with baby-head smell,” Reynolds told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show in March when talking about his daughter, James, with wife Blake Lively. “We’d just be like, ‘What are we doing, guys? Come on. Let’s lay down our arms. Let’s high-five each other to death.'”
Chris Rock
“When I hear people talk about juggling or the sacrifices they make for their children, I look at them like they’re crazy, because ‘sacrifice’ infers that there was something better to do than being with your children,” said Rock in a 2012 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air. “And I’ve never been with my kids and gone, ‘Man, I wish I was on my stage right now.’ I’ve never been with my kids and gone, ‘Man, it’d be so great if I was on a movie set right now.’ But I’ve been doing a movie and wished that I was with my kids, I’ve been on tour and wished that I was with my kids. Being with my kids is the best, most fun thing, it’s a privilege. It’s not something I call a sacrifice.”
Dax Shepard
“When I look at her, it’s like when I was in 7th grade and fell in love for the first time, where it’s debilitating,” said Shepard in 2013 of his then four-month-old daughter, Lincoln, with wife Kristen Bell. “That’s available 24/7 if I want, which is amazing.”
Chris Pratt
Written By: Ellen Sturm Niz
