Wedding planning can be more chaotic than a trip to the Upside Down, but Millie Bobby Brown has one Stranger Things co-star she can lean on to help make her big day extra special. As the actor prepares to marry Jake Bongiovi, her on-screen “Papa” revealed that he is going to officiate the ceremony. Matthew Modine revealed he will preside over Brown’s nuptials, making the wedding a sweet Stranger Things reunion.
Modine told Access on March 21 that once Brown and Bongiovi heard he had a license to officiate weddings, they both agreed he would be the perfect person to marry them. “I have one of those licenses to get people married and Millie thought it’d be great and then Jake said it would be a great idea,” Modine said. “So I wrote the wedding vows and they loved what I wrote for them to join hands and to become husband and wife.”
It’s clear Brown and Modine’s IRL relationship is much less complicated than their on-screen one. On Stranger Things, Modine plays Dr. Brenner, a complex father figure to Brown’s Eleven whom she refers to as “Papa.” That may sound sweet, but for most of Eleven’s life, Dr. Brenner had held her captive, experimented on her, and manipulated her to try to unlock her powers. It wasn’t until a climactic moment in Season 4 when Brenner sacrificed himself to save Eleven’s life that his deep love for his pseudo-daughter became apparent.
As for the upcoming wedding, Brown and Bongiovi have yet to publicly reveal the date. The couple first started dating in 2021, and announced their engagement in April 2023. But the proposal didn’t go super smoothly, as Brown recently revealed when recounting the story on The Tonight Show.
She shared that Bongiovi proposed to her underwater while the two were diving together, which didn’t turn out to be as romantic as it sounds. Since she couldn’t verbally respond when her fiancé gave her the ring, Brown had to accept it by doing the “OK” sign with her hands. And then, as they resurfaced, the ring slipped off Brown’s hand and Bongiovi quickly dove back down to retrieve it.
Brown said she would be keeping her wedding planning private in an August 2023 WWD interview, but it’s been “so fun and it’s such an exciting time in [her] life.” With an officiant all lined up, it certainly sounds like the wedding bells will be ringing pretty soon.