Even when Jonathan Bennett is old, gray and maybe a little thin on top, he’ll still be smiling on Oct. 3.
“I owe my whole life to Mean Girls,” the actor tells Yahoo. “I don’t know where I’d be if that movie hadn’t happened.”
In his breakthrough role, Bennett played Aaron Samuels — the high school heartthrob caught between queen bee Regina George (Rachel McAdams) and her rival Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan). The 2004 teen flick went on to become a cult classic, so much so that Mean Girls Day was born out of a single line of dialogue when Aaron asks Cady what day it was in the middle of math class and she famously replies, “It’s October 3rd.”
“Many times people make movies like that and then want to detach or distance themselves from it,” Bennett says. “My opinion is: Why? That’s the thing that made you. No matter what I do, they’re always going to call me Aaron Samuels. When I’m 100, they’ll still say, ‘What day is it?’ ‘Your hair looks sexy pushed back’ — if I still have hair by that time. They’re always gonna do it because it makes them so happy.”
It’s true: Mean Girls Day may be the day social media is flooded with movie memes — “Stop trying to make fetch happen!” — and true diehards eat cheese fries and wear pink, but the film lives rent-free in people’s heads all year long. And its cultural footprint continues to grow, including the 2024 Mean Girls movie musical and the 2023 Black Friday reunion commercial.
“It’s not just a film, it’s part of people’s lives,” Bennett says. “They quote it, dress up like [the characters]. Few movies [have that impact] anymore. It was lightning in a bottle — and I’m just happy that it happened.”
Bennett’s relationship with the role that made him a star has evolved — just as he has as a performer and person. Closeted during filming, he feared coming out would cost him his career. But in the years since he did, in 2017, he’s come into his own, flourishing as he champions LGBTQ representation onscreen.
From pigeonholed to pioneer
It took a little while to get there. For nearly a decade after Mean Girls, Bennett felt boxed in by the character he’d become so synonymous with.
Bennett, with Lindsay Lohan in 2004’s Mean Girls, says “the OG cast” of the film periodically texts and DMs: “We’re supporting each other on the sidelines no matter what.” (Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection)
“I’d walk into an audition and they’d say, ‘Aaron Samuels is here.’ I’d be like: Jonathan Bennett’s here,” he says. “It’s a blessing and a curse. Your character becomes bigger than you.”
Realizing he was “never going to be able to get away from it,” he pushed forward, landing roles opposite Kristin Cavallari in 2009’s Van Wilder: Freshman Year and Amanda Bynes in the 2005 rom-com Lovewrecked.
While continuing to act, host, dance and even coauthor a cookbook, the true turning point came when he publicly shared he was gay and embraced his identity, a decision that redefined both his personal life and professional journey.
“I almost feel like I had two careers. I was so nervous to come out because I was afraid I was never gonna work again,” he says. “[After I did], it kind of reinvented Jonathan Bennett — who I was in this industry [and] who I was in the world. That’s where I really started shining.”
Once Bennett was able to be his authentic self, things fell into place.
“It opened all these doors that I never thought could open,” he says.
Some of the doors have led to groundbreaking opportunities: In 2020, he appeared in The Christmas House, the first Hallmark Channel movie to show a same-sex kiss. He followed that up by starring in the network’s first LGBTQ-led Christmas movie, The Holiday Sitter, in 2022. He’s since played a gay former baseball player turned coach in the channel’s The Groomsmen trilogy. The second installment, featuring the channel’s first film with a gay wedding as its central storyline, won a GLAAD Media Award for representation in March.
“I didn’t set out in my career to become a person that’s telling queer stories all the time,” says Bennett, who has been in more than 10 Hallmark films (so far). “I saw the response from our viewers — messages like: ‘I’ve watched Christmas movies for years, and now I get to see a love that looks like mine’ — and realized: This is my mission. My job now is to make sure I’m telling queer stories — and not just for a queer audience, but for a broad [one, so everyone can] realize that gay love, straight love and bisexual love — there’s no difference. It’s all the same. It’s just love. And love stories are for everybody.”
If you told him 10 years ago that this would be his path, he’d say no way. But it “fell into my lap, and I embraced it. This is what I was born to do.”
Bennett, right, with Brad Harder in The Christmas House. (Allister Foster/Hallmark Entertainment /Courtesy Everett Collection)
Alongside his passion for telling meaningful stories, he’s continuing to build his presence as a TV host. He’s hosting Food Network’s Halloween Wars, which premiered its 15th season on Sept. 21, overseeing treat makers competing to craft the creepiest, most creative confections — with humor and joy.
His festive reign doesn’t stop there. Proudly dubbed the “Gay King of Christmas” — “I’m gonna humbly say that I think I called myself that first, but then it stuck,” he laughs — Bennett is back helming and executive producing Finding Mr. Christmas, the Hallmark+ reality competition series he cocreated, returning on Oct. 27. The show sees contestants competing in cheerful challenges for the title of Mr. Christmas — and a role in a holiday movie on the network.
Letting his true colors shine
Sticking with the theme of love stories being for everybody, Bennett has written his own offscreen. In 2022, he married Jaymes Vaughan, an Amazing Race alum and TV personality, six years after meeting.
Bennett’s Instagram and TikTok have become a window into their life together, where he often shares playful and humorous moments as well as heartfelt glimpses into their relationship.
“Social media is such a powerful thing,” he says. “It’s amazing — [and] sometimes it’s horrible. I think everyone has a love-hate relationship with it, myself included. … But I do think it’s done something that I wish I had when I was 18 years old. That is: My husband and I have been able to share our story and our love life and our marriage with everyone — and we do that on purpose. It’s not because we like to look at videos of us kissing. I don’t need to see another picture of me kissing. But the kid that’s sitting in Omaha, Neb., who feels alone, might need to see [it].”
Bennett and husband Jaymes Vaughan tied the knot in 2022. (Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images)
Bennett, who grew up in Ohio, continues, “We didn’t have anything like that when I was growing up. It makes me emotional. When you don’t have something — and it’s needed — it’s your job to create it. I said this when we won our GLAAD award for The Groomsmen: ‘If you don’t see it, it’s your job to be it.’”
As Mean Girls Day comes around once more — for which he has something planned for the Plastics posse, “a very fun skit” he’ll share on Instagram — we couldn’t help but wonder what Bennett’s younger self, circa the time he was filming the movie in 2003, would think about where he is today.
“If I could talk to that little baby Jonathan, I would say: One, stop flat-ironing your hair,” he laughs. “You don’t need to do that. It looks fine how it is. [Two], stop wearing distressed jeans. You’re going to look back at the photos and be like: ‘Why did I wear those?’ And third, don’t be scared of who you are [and] to show the people around you who you are. Because the thing you’re afraid of — which is that they’re not going to love you, they’re not going to hire you, they’re not going to want to work with you — isn’t true. They’re going to love you. So let your true colors shine right now. Don’t wait.”
