Eva Mendes reveals why she lied about being pregnant on Ellen

EVA Mendes has revealed the reason she lied about her pregnancy.

The 40-year-old actress appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show on Wednesday and Ellen took the opportunity to call her out for lying about being pregnant the last time she appeared on her show.

The talk show host welcomed Mendes to the couch, joking, “Congratulations, liar!” and then shared a clip of her denying the rumours back in February.

Mendes — who gave birth to her first child 10 weeks ago — defended her decision not to share the pregnancy news with Ellen. “I was so early on and all mums will understand, you’re not supposed to tell anybody during your first, well certainly not the world, in your first trimester,” she explained.

“And my mother didn’t even know yet. So that would have been an awkward phone call. ‘Hey mum did you catch Ellen today?’ Um, oops.”

The Hitch star welcomed baby girl Esmerelda with her partner Ryan Gosling, 34, on September 12 but the notoriously private pair managed to keep the news under wraps for the first seven months.

Mendes explained to Ellen their reason for this, saying, “I think just early on, we decided it’s going to be very hard for her to have privacy. And we thought this is the first opportunity we can give her to protect her and so then I had a nice calm pregnancy, which I did.”

Ellen also shared Esmerelda’s “first photo” — a fake pic of the gorgeous couple’s newborn daughter, which was a hilarious mashup of their two faces.

Eva Mendes and Ryan Gosling pictured before the birth of their daughter Esmer

Looking flawless in a red sleeveless frock, the brunette beauty credited breastfeeding with getting her fantastic figure back so quickly. “It really does help to shrink your uterus back to normal size ... I know it’s a really weird thing to say, but it does,” she said.

Meanwhile, her Place Beyond The Pines co-star and beau has been busy filming his new movie, The Nice Guys with Russell Crowe in Atlanta, Georgia and has been flying back and forth from Los Angeles to be with his two girls.