Millie Bobby Brown nearly lost her engagement ring when fiancé Jake Bongiovi proposed during a diving trip.
The Stranger Things star, 20, recounted the thrilling tale during her appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Thursday, February 29, explaining that the couple “bonded over diving” throughout their relationship. On the day he popped the question, Bongiovi, 21, invited Brown on an early morning dive at one of their go-to spots.
“So we go under, and we’re, like, many meters down,” Brown told host Jimmy Fallon. “And he gives me a shell, and I turn it over, and it’s a ring.”
She went on to mimic Bongiovi’s garbled speech underwater, detailing her reaction. “This means, ‘up,’” she said, raising her thumb. “‘I want to go up.’ So that would technically mean, ‘No, I don’t want to marry you, I want to go up.’
Brown had to figure out another method of saying yes, which turned out to be a little “underwhelming,” but the twosome still “freaked out” over the milestone moment.
“Anyways, he puts the ring on my hand, and as I go to show him, the ring falls off my finger, plummets so fast it was like a cinematic movie,” she said. “Jake threw himself, like, so deep, like, the diver was like, ‘You can’t do that, like, your ears — literally your brain will explode.’”
Bongiovi did a “cinematic grab,” Brown recalled. “[He] opens [his hand] and he saved the ring,” she gushed. “It’s a reflection of who he is and I feel like we’re always going to have each other’s back and if anyone drops the ball, we got it.”
Brown pointed out that when Bongiovi asked for her mother’s blessing, she said he could “absolutely not” take the ring underwater to propose, arguing, “I know you’ll drop it.” The real ring, however, was given to Brown after their dive.
“So when we got up on the boat he was like, ‘This is your mom’s ring and I got it from your parents,’” the Godzilla King of Monsters star recalled on Thursday. “And it was very magical and his parents were there and we just looked so disheveled coming out from a dive.”
The couple, who met on social media, announced their engagement in April 2023. (Bongiovi is the son of Jon Bon Jovi and Dorothea Hurley.)
“Millie and Jake are on cloud nine and can’t believe they get to spend the rest of their lives together,” a source exclusively told Us Weekly in September 2023.
Brown, who has received criticism about getting engaged so young, told Glamour in October 2023 that the couple “were modeled wonderful, loving relationships” in their lives before making the big decision. “So, it’s something that we both had that mutual drive for,” she explained.
