By Page Six | Created at 2026-08-25 17:15:46 | Updated at 2026-09-14 22:09:50
2 weeks ago
Ben Barnes and Aubrey Cleland quietly got engaged late last year, Page Six can exclusively reveal.
We’re told the London-born actor-musician, 45, proposed to the “American Idol” contestant-turned-actress, 33, by the sea in the southwest of England on Dec. 31, 2025 — New Year’s Eve.
Barnes and Cleland were in the UK for their first holiday together with both of their families at the time, according to our source.
Neither has publicly addressed the engagement, and they’ve kept their two-year relationship mostly under wraps.
Our source confirmed the pair began dating in the summer of 2024. That December, Cleland appeared in Barnes’ music video for his song “Nevermind.”
She then joined him on stage for a “beautiful duet” of his track “One Minute More” during a January 2025 concert in Portland, Oregon, where she is from.
He told the crowd at a Stockholm, Sweden, show the following month that he wrote the ballad “The In Between” while going through a “miserable breakup” and “very, very rough time.”
The notoriously private multi-hyphenate has previously been linked to Tamsin Egerton, Felicity Jones and Julianne Hough, though he’s never addressed the reported romances.
After the Stockholm audience let out a collective “awww,” Barnes assured them he was “very happy now.”
In July 2025, the “Chronicles of Narnia” franchise star and Cleland — who has appeared in “Black Widow,” “Lethal Weapon” and “The Row” — were photographed together on an apparent dinner date.
At the time, paparazzi caught the dressed-up duo walking arm in arm in London.
Though they follow each other on Instagram, neither Barnes nor Cleland has posted about the other.
However, they frequently exchange “likes,” with Barnes often leaving heart emojis beneath uploads of Cleland’s artwork.
Our source told us they are already parents to a Siamese cat named Simba and will be making Los Angeles their permanent home.
Reps for the couple did not immediately respond to Page Six’s requests for comment.
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