Vanessa Hudgens and Cole Tucker are expecting their first baby together, which she revealed on the red carpet at the 2024 Oscars.
Hudgens, 34, stepped out in a black turtleneck dress that hugged her baby bump. She accessorized with Chopard jewelry, including a white gold necklace with a 10.06-carat pear-shaped yellow diamond and 29.88-carats of diamonds, along with matching diamond earrings and diamond rings from the Haute Joaillerie Collection.
“[Cole] treats her better than any guy she has been with. They are in a really good place,” an insider tells Us Weekly. “With marriage and a baby, she is ready for the next phase of life.”
This will be the first child for both Hudgens and Tucker, who tied the knot in December 2023 at a ceremony in Tulum, Mexico.
The pregnancy news comes after Hudgens denied pregnancy rumors in October. Photos from her bachelorette trip to Aspen — in which she was wearing baggy clothing — sparked baby speculation.
“Why does she look pregnant to me or like she’s trying to hide a bump 🤔🤔,” a social media user wrote, to which Hudgens replied, “Not pregnant so y’all can stop.”
The couple met via a meditation Zoom hosted by Joe Jonas amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and the actress was first spotted holding hands with the baseball player in November 2020. They made their relationship Instagram official the following February.
Tucker first gushed about their romance later that month.
“I got a girlfriend and she’s cool. She’s awesome, I love her,” he told reporters at spring training for the Pittsburgh Pirates (he later moved to the Colorado Rockies). “But I don’t want it to be, ‘Oh, Cole’s dating Vanessa …’ I don’t want it to be treated any differently than Mitch [Keller] having his wife down, or Ke’Bryan [Hayes] having his girlfriend come down. She’s great. She’ll be around. You will see her, but you saw the headline, it is what it is.”
After more than two years of dating, the pair got engaged in late December 2022. Hudgens shared an Instagram photo of her diamond ring two months later.
During an April 2023 interview with Today, Hudgens confessed she knew Tucker was The One almost immediately. “I knew. After our first weekend together, I called my sister and was like, ‘I think I just found my future husband,’” she gushed.
An insider told Us the following June that they were planning to have children sooner rather than later. “They both want a family now and that’s what’s driving them toward getting married [soon],” a source told Us at the time, noting that Hudgens has “no doubt” that the baseball player will make a great dad.
Hudgens has previously spoken out about wanting to be a mother and realizing her timeline wouldn’t go as planned. “I always thought I would be married at 25, because that’s when my mom got married, and then when that didn’t happen, I was like, ‘Oh, OK, So we’re just going to shift everything back a bit,'” she told Nylon in September 2022. “I always thought that around 36, 37 is when I would want to have kids, and that still plays. I don’t feel panicked about it.”
Prior to her romance with Tucker, Hudgens dated High School Musical costar Zac Efron from 2006 to 2010 and then was in a nine-year relationship with Austin Butler until their January 2020 breakup.
Reporting by Travis Cronin
