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Benny Blanco surprised his fiancée Selena Gomez with her very own prom after discovering she wasn’t able to attend one in high school due to her young fame.
Gomez got her start in Hollywood as a child actress on the series “Barney & Friends” at age 10 before landing the role of Alex Russo on Disney Channel’s “Wizards of Waverly Place” and releasing a slew of hit albums — plus she was homeschooled — so she never got the chance to attend a prom.
However, her Prince Charming changed all of that.
Blanco, 37, who she’s been engaged to since December, shared the sweet footage of the prom he threw for Gomez via Instagram on Thursday.
Set to the song “Just the Two of Us” by Bill Withers and Grover Washington, Jr., the music producer explained, “My fiancée has never been to prom before…so I asked her if we should take prom photos together at a mall…she said yes!”
Gomez, 32, wore a purple gown while her thoughtful fiancé sported a black tuxedo and bowtie. She got her stairwell moment, and Blanco pulled out all the stops. The couple of nearly two years even arrived at a mall in a limo to take their prom pictures together.
“It was more fun than either of us expected it to be,” Blanco wrote, including their snaps of the outdated, blue backdrop.
In one shot, Blanco was on all fours as Gomez sat on top of him.
“This is how they turned out,” Blanco continued as the final images appeared in the video montage. They busted out the classic prom poses, too, including one gazing into each other’s eyes.
Fans flocked to the comments section to share their admiration for Blanco’s idea.
“The greenest flag to ever be flown!!!!! We love you Benny!!!!” one follower wrote, while a second fan chimed in, “Did u come straight out of a romance novel or what?”
Blanco first revealed the sweet gesture while on “The Jennifer Hudson Show” earlier this month, detailing, “Selena had never been to a prom before, so I thought I’d throw us a prom for my birthday.”
Despite Blanco going to his prom back in school, he shared with host Jennifer Hudson, 43, “Honestly, my favorite prom was with my partner.”
Gomez has reflected on her childhood fame in the past, telling Elle in 2024, “I have no regrets and I have a fantastic family and there were rules laid down by my parents and I’m appreciative of that.
“However, I don’t think I would’ve done it very young if I was thinking of myself now. There were a lot of things that I felt stunted by. Then adding a lot of pressure from a lot of people didn’t help me develop a sense of self in my twenties. It was a very difficult time,” she shared. “
I live with it every day. I try my hardest to stay positive about everything and focus on things like this [movie] that really make me happy. But I would just say maybe wait and have a little bit of a life.”
Blanco and Gomez got engaged at the end of last year after dating for a year. In March, Blanco revealed that the surprise engagement almost didn’t go as planned.
“It was the sickest surprise that she had no idea about and it couldn’t have come at a better time because I was starting to f–k up. The thing that makes me so crazy is, you’re getting engaged, and right before, they’re like, ‘Show me how good of a liar you are. Sneak around and try to do this perfect thing without me knowing.’ At the end, she was starting to get upset because she was like, ‘Why aren’t you coming home tonight?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I’m just at my friends,'” he said during a sit down with Interview Magazine in February. “I almost did it early. But I nailed it, I think.”
That same month, the duo also released a joint album “I Said I Love You First.”
“The fact that he listened to me,” Gomez told the outlet about what she loved most about working with Blanco.
“Sometimes it’s difficult for me to speak up. Most of my anxiety right now is wanting him to speak because I feel like he’s more talented than I am in this field. It’s like working with a great filmmaker,” the actress added. “Whether we were together or not, I think he still would’ve listened to everything that I had to say, and he was able to almost transcribe it into music, into what the feeling of what I was talking about should be. And I really found that to be helpful because this album definitely feels just as much mine as I’m sure it does his.
English (US)