Selena Gomez and fiancé Benny Blanco turned heads when they walked the Oscars red carpet on Sunday, though for entirely different reasons.
The Emilia Perez actress dripped in diamonds and dazzled in a Ralph Lauren gown embellished with Rosemont crystals and more than 16,000 drops of glass.
Blanco sported his now signature white suit, frizzy hair and – what appeared to be – a two-day stubble on his face. While Gomez evoked classic Hollywood glamour, Blanco’s style said: I just woke up.
Indeed, at a glance, they couldn’t seem a more unlikely pair.
It’s hard to forget the couple’s appearance at the Golden Globes earlier this year, when host Nikki Glaser savagely roasted them.
‘Selena Gomez is here with Benny Blanco, her new fiancé, and Benny Blanco is here because of the genie who granted him that wish,’ Glaser joked on stage, the camera panning to Gomez and Blanco awkwardly laughing in the audience.
Selena Gomez and fiancé Benny Blanco turned heads when they walked the Oscars red carpet on Sunday, though for entirely different reasons.
Selena Gomez, 32, and Benny Blanco, 36, made their first post-engagement appearance together at the 2025 Golden Globe Awards in January.
The comedian’s quip wasn’t far off from what many people online have been saying.
Since Gomez and Blanco confirmed their relationship more than one year ago, fans and critics alike have struggled to understand how a classically beautiful billionaire like Gomez is interested in such an average-looking guy.
‘I don’t get what she sees in him,’ one user wrote on X in response to a photo of the couple. ‘She can do so much better,’ another chimed in. Some have gone as far as to call him her future ‘ugly husband’.
But perhaps they’re not giving Blanco the credit he deserves.
‘Selena has said multiple times that Benny is the love of her life, and she means it,’ a source close to Gomez exclusively told the Daily Mail.
Indeed, that insider says that Blanco embodies something Gomez may covet above all else: stability.
Certainly, Gomez’s life has been anything but predictable.
Born to a 16-year-old mom and thrust into child stardom at just 15, Gomez, now 32, never really had the time to be a normal kid.
Her very public, on-and-off relationship with Justin Bieber surely didn’t help matters.
Then, at 21-years-old, in 2013, she was diagnosed with lupus – an autoimmune disease which ultimately caused her to need a kidney transplant.
In 2018, after splitting from Bieber, she suffered a breakdown and spent time in a mental health facility. In 2020, she publicly confirmed that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Then walks in Blanco, a successful musician in his own right with 11 Grammy nominations under his belt.
Though his net worth (a reported $50 million) is only a fraction of Gomez’s estimated $1.3 billion – which is largely thanks to her makeup line Rare Beauty – really it was Blanco’s lack of an ulterior motive that warmed Gomez to the music producer, our insider says.
‘Yes, they are both aware that Selena is worth so much more than Benny,’ the source said, noting that Blanco has already signed a prenuptial agreement ahead of their marriage to ‘show [Gomez] that he wants nothing more from her than her love.’
But what, some may still ask, does he have to offer her?
Gomez and Blanco pose together for Interview Magazine’s March 2025 issue, marking their first joint interview since announcing their relationship.
The 36-year-old, whose real name is Benjamin Levin, was raised by parents Sandra and Andrew Levin in the affluent Washington, D.C. suburb of Reston, Virginia, with his older brother Jeremy. His father worked in the apparel business, while his mother worked at an assisted living facility.
Blanco originally aspired to be a rapper but concluded that ‘no one cares what a chubby Jewish kid from Virginia thinks,’ and decided to make beats instead. As a child, he attended a Jewish summer camp – Camp Airy – in Thurmont, Maryland. There, he hosted a radio show called ‘Ebba Ebba’.
Determined to make it in the music industry, he took weekend trips to New York City to secure meetings with record executives.
He funded the trips himself and even spent nights sleeping in a Times Square McDonald’s. His hard work paid off when he caught the attention of producer Disco D (David Shayman), working with him until Shayman’s tragic suicide in 2007.
Aside from music, Blanco has made a name for himself in the food industry.
In his debut cookbook, published last year and titled ‘Open Wide: A Cookbook for Friends’, Blanco shared traditional recipes and some of his fond childhood memories, such as going to Jewish delis with his father.
‘Even more so than actually being religious and going to temple, the Jewish cuisine has been such a lubricant bringing my friends and family together in a way that is pretty magical,’ Blanco said in an interview promoting the cookbook last April.
Gomez has since happily enmeshed herself in her fiancé’s traditions, joining Blanco and his friends for Passover seder last year.
However, Gomez – who was raised Catholic – won’t be converting to Judaism just yet; Blanco recently revealed to Interview Magazine that the couple want their future children ‘to have both of our values’ and ‘both of our morals’ to ‘mix them up in a pot’.
Blanco, seen with his mother Sandra, was raised in a Jewish household and has shared how his Ashkenazi Jewish heritage has played a major role in his life.
The music producer paid tribute to his Jewish upbringing in his 2024 cookbook, ‘Open Wide: A Cookbook for Friends’. (Pictured: Blanco with his mother Sandra).
Gomez joined Blanco and his friends, including comedian Eric Andre (right), for Passover seder last year.
The singer also appears to get on well with Blanco’s friends and family.
The pair celebrated their December engagement with an intimate gathering that included Blanco’s parents, his brother Jeremy, and his sister-in-law Evi.
Evi captioned a snap of the celebration: ‘I finally got a sister.’
‘So happy for you guys,’ Jeremy wrote on his own Instagram story.
Blanco’s career as a music producer didn’t truly take off until the early 2010s, when he was already well into adulthood, so he at least had the opportunity to grow up under relatively normal circumstances
For Gomez, it was a different experience. She shot to stardom as a young teenager and has admitted that the process made her feel ‘stunted’ as an adult.
Growing up in Grand Prairie, Texas, Gomez’s parents – Amanda ‘Mandy’ Dawn Cornett and Ricardo ‘Rick’ Joel Gómez – were just teenagers when she was born in 1992, and they split when she was five.
Mandy – who had dreams of being an actress – would bring her daughter to auditions and rehearsals, and Gomez was only six or seven-years-old when she caught the acting bug herself.
‘She went to one of my rehearsals with me and sat through the whole thing, not moving. On the way home, she was quiet, and then she goes, “You know, Mom, that might be funnier if you did it this way.” And I thought, “Oh, no. She’s going to be an actor”,’ Mandy told the New York Times in 2017.
After a brief stint on the children’s program Barney & Friends when she was 10, Gomez landed the role of a lifetime on the Disney Channel as Alex Russo in Wizards of Waverly Place. The TV series made her a star at just 15.
She was inarguably made even more famous during that time for her whirlwind relationship with Baby heartthrob Justin Bieber. The couple were nicknamed by obsessive fans around the world as ‘Jelena’.
They had confirmed their relationship in 2011, when they walked the red carpet at that year’s Vanity Fair Oscars Party, before briefly breaking up in 2015. They reconciled two years later, but officially ended their relationship in 2018.
Gomez had launched her own music career in 2013, with the hit debut single ‘Come & Get It’, achieving instant success. But all the while, through the breakups and sold-out concerts, she was also secretly battling with those severe mental and physical health struggles.
While Gomez attempted to carry on with her career, she was eventually forced to cancel her 2016 Revival tour – citing anxiety and depression brought on by her lupus.
‘I want to be proactive and focus on maintaining my health and happiness and have decided that the best way forward is to take some time off,’ Gomez told People in a statement at the time. ‘I’ve discovered that anxiety, panic attacks and depression can be side effects of lupus, which can present their own challenges.’
She underwent her kidney transplant in June 2017, after actress and close pal Francia Raisa offered to donate the organ. Gomez publicly praised her ‘beautiful friend’ for giving her ‘the ultimate gift and sacrifice by donating her kidney.’
But the health challenges didn’t stop there, as reports surfaced in October 2018 that Gomez – 26 at the time – was receiving mental health treatment after suffering an ’emotional breakdown.’
According to TMZ, who were first to report the news, Gomez had been hospitalized in the last week of September after she became ‘despondent and emotional’ over her alarmingly low white blood cell count in the wake of her kidney transplant.
Gomez has a close relationship with her mother Mandy Teefey (the pair are pictured together in 2009), who gave birth to the actor when she was 16 years old. She worked as her daughter’s manager until 2014.
Gomez’s father Rick (pictured with Selena) has remained out of the spotlight, though he often shows his support for his famous daughter on social media.
Gomez and Bieber confirmed they were dating at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in 2011 (pictured), sparking an on-and-off relationship that would last for seven years.
She was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where she stayed for several days before being released.
Gomez was re-admitted to the hospital just two weeks later, though this time she was more resistant to help. Multiple sources claimed that Gomez had ‘a meltdown’ and ‘freaked out’, insisting she left the hospital and even tried ripping an IV out of her arm, according to TMZ reporting at the time.
That breakdown – Gomez later explained to Rolling Stone in 2022 – included hearing voices in her head, which grew louder and louder. Gomez says she only remembers snippets from the episode, which ultimately landed her in a psychiatric care facility.
Gomez said she spent ‘several months’ in a constant state of paranoia and didn’t trust anyone. ‘It was just that I was gone,’ she said. ‘There was no part of me that was there anymore.’
It was during her stay at the mental health facility that she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Gomez eventually shared that diagnosis with her fans in 2020 while appearing on Miley Cyrus’s Instagram Live series, ‘Bright Minded’.
‘I finally had the knowledge of why I had suffered with various depressions and anxieties for so many years,’ Gomez explained. ‘I never had full awareness or answers about this condition.’
Now, Gomez speaks about her relationship with Blanco as if she is opening a new chapter in her life.
‘I’ve kind of been alone in the world,’ she said in Interview Magazine’s March issue – her first joint interview with Blanco.
‘I was alone for five years before we got together, and I think that really helped me appreciate someone like Ben. He gets so weirded out by me saying this, but genuinely, 10 years ago, I wasn’t in a space in my life where I could have accepted the kind of patience, the kind of unconditional love that he gives me.’
From child stardom to public breakups and breakdowns, in just 32 years, Gomez’s life has already been anything but smooth sailing.
Sure, she and her fiancé will continue to face their fair share of trolls asking, ‘Why is she with him?’, but if there’s anything to be gleaned from her unpredictable journey, it’s that Blanco may be exactly who she needs.
