‘Mean Girls’ star Bennett to wed beau
Christmas bells have turned into wedding bells for “Mean Girls” star Jonathan Bennett.
The 39-year-old actor — one of the stars of the first Hallmark holiday movie to feature a gay lead, “The Christmas House” — said “Yes! Of course!” after his boyfriend of three years got down on one knee and proposed.
Bennett, who starred in 2004’s Lindsay Lohan classic comedy “Mean Girls,” confirmed the news to People, saying that the made-forTV proposal was a total surprise.
“I love how I can be unapologetically myself, and I love that [Jaymes Vaughan] loves me unconditionally for it,” he told the publication.
Vaughan, a 37-year-old television personality who first came onto the Hollywood spotlight in 2012 as a runnerup to season 21 of the Emmy Award-winning reality show “The Amazing Race,” wrote a song to accompany the proposal to his soon-to-be husband.
‘While [Bennett] was in Canada filming “The Christmas House” for Hallmark, I took a melody that up until now had only be accompanied by chopsticks on my voice notes, and got together with my friend Tanzer, who happens to be a really talented producer and my favorite person to write songs with and said, ‘Let’s make this magical for Jonathan,’ ” he said.
At one point during the couple’s stay in Canada, Bennett “was told we were going to be taking family Christmas card photos,” so, unaware of what awaited him, he went along with the idea, alongside his family, including his photographer nephew, and Vaughan’s photographer friend.
“But then no one would look me in the eye and I was like what is going on? I later found it out it was because they didn’t want to spoil what was about to happen,” Bennett said.
When his sister told him to run outside, he saw Vaughan holding a sign that said “We never did find our song, so I wrote it for you.”
That’s when he realized what was going on.
“I knew [I] was getting proposed to because it was the same type of sign he made when he told me he loved me for the first time. And then I began to ugly-cry the ugliest cry anyone has ever cried,” he said — a moment that was captured for eternity by the two photographers standing next to them.
Vaughan, who’s now the anchor of Reelz Channel’s entertainment news program “Celebrity Page,” met Bennett while he was promoting his Food Network show “Halloween Wars,” which Bennett has hosted since 2016.
The couple made their relationship public in November 2017, by sharing a picture of both of them — and their little dog, too — in their “Top Gun” Halloween costumes.
“When I saw Jaymes take a knee I was so excited I just started hysterically screaming because I didn’t know how to express myself properly,” Bennett described his reaction to the surprising engagement to People.
“There was a moment when you feel like “Oh, this is forever, I understand it.” I screamed “Yes” immediately. Actually it was, “Yes! Of course!” he added.