Millie Bobby Brown reveals Jake Bongiovi proposed to her underwater

Millie Bobby Brown and Jake Bongiovi announced their engagement in April 2023

Millie Bobby Brown has revealed how her fiancé Jake Bongiovi proposed to her.

The actor, 20, recently appeared on Thursday 29 February’s episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, where she finally told the story behind her April 2023 proposal.

“Well, I haven’t told anyone this because there are moments, key moments, but I’m like, ‘Fallon is the best,’ and also I think this is too good of a story to not tell,” Brown said. “Basically, Jake and I bonded over diving. We love diving, we got our diving licences together.”

The couple was on vacation when rock star Jon Bon Jovi’s son randomly asked Brown to wake up at 8.00am for a dive. “I was like, ‘8.00am, dive?’... And he’s telling me, ‘We’re going to the same spot we usually go to,’” the Stranger Things star continued. “I’m like, ‘It’s boring, let’s go somewhere new.’ He’s like, ‘No, we have to go to this spot,’” she added.

During the dive, the 21-year-old handed her a shell with a ring inside but because they were underwater, Brown explained how there were only air bubbles coming out of Bongiovi’s mouth. “This means, ‘up,’” she said, raising a thumbs up in the air. “‘I want to go up.’ So, that would technically mean, ‘No, I don’t want to marry you, I want to go up.’”

“So I was like, ‘OK,’” Brown explained, as she did an “OK” hand symbol. “And I think it was underwhelming, but we freaked out.”

“Anyways, he puts the ring on my hand and as I go to show him, the ring falls off my finger - plummets, like, so fast. It was like a cinematic movie,” she said, adding: “Jake threw himself, like so deep. The diver was like, ‘You can’t do that, your ears... literally your brain will explode.’”

In order to save the ring, the Enola Holmes star explained that Bongiovi had done a “cinematic grab” and “he saved the ring.”

Brown explained how her fiancé’s gesture was “a reflection of who he is,” adding: “I feel like we’re always going to have each other’s back and if anyone drops the ball, we got it.”

He was then able to formally ask Brown for her hand in marriage, revealing that he had to buy a ring because Brown’s mother wouldn’t let him use hers for the elaborate proposal. Brown recalled her mother telling her then-boyfriend: “Absolutely not, Jake. You’re not taking my ring down there, I know you’ll drop it.”

“So when we got up on the boat he was like, ‘This is your mom’s ring and I got it from your parents,’” she recounted. “And it was very magical and his parents were there and we just looked so dishevelled coming out from a dive.”

The Godzilla vs Kong actor and the rock singer’s son first sparked engagement rumours when Brown shared an Instagram post of the pair with what appeared to be an engagement ring on her left hand. She captioned the post with song lyrics from Taylor Swift’s track, “Lover”.

“I’ve loved you three summers now, honey, I want ‘em all,” she wrote, adding a white heart emoji. Bongiovi also shared a post on his own account, simply writing “forever” alongside two photographs of the couple in the same location.