Halle Berry announces engagement to Van Hunt after nearly 6 years of dating

“He did put a little ring on it,” the star told Jimmy Fallon.

Halle Berry is planning a walk down the aisle for the fourth time; the Oscar winner revealed that she and boyfriend Van Hunt are officially engaged.

Berry shared the news with host Jimmy Fallon on Thursday’s episode of The Tonight Show, after a recent interview with The Cut garnered headlines that the Monster’s Ball actress turned down a proposal from Hunt last year.

“There’s some confusion,” Berry told Fallon. “It’s going around that I, that my guy Van Hunt — I’ve been dating him now for almost six years — well, there’s some confusion that he asked to marry me and I said no. I did not say no.”

Berry and Hunt have been together since they met during the COVID pandemic lockdown in 2020, after being set up by Hunt’s brother. They spoken on the phone for four months before meeting in real life on a date, and the rest was history. As such, Berry told Fallon that, “of course I said yes, I would marry him,” adding that the pair just don’t have a set date for their nuptials.

Amid congratulations from Jimmy, the action star teased, “He did put a little ring on it,” showing off the (not-so-little) chunky gold engagement ring, featuring black designs and a diamond on top. 

In the recently published profile with The Cut that led to the “confusion,” Berry shared that although Hunt proposed to her in June, she hasn’t accepted.

“I haven’t said ‘yes.’ I don’t think we need to be married to have a meaningful relationship,” Berry told the outlet of Hunt’s proposal. “I don’t know if we will ever get married.” The outlet noted that Berry cited “health reasons,” or the access and right to make crucial medical decisions as a legal spouse, as one of her exceptions to the rule.

Hunt himself confirmed that he had proposed to Berry during a joint interview for Today.com in June, and that the award winner hadn’t given him an answer at the time. “So I put out the proposal, and it’s still on hold as you can see,” he shared. “It’s just out there floating. You know, maybe you can encourage her.”

Berry explained that since both she and Hunt have already been down the aisle before, she didn’t feel the need to affirm their bond with marriage yet. “I’ve been married three times,” she pointed out. “Van has been married once, and so no, we don’t feel like we have to get married to validate our love in any way. We don’t.”

However, that didn’t mean marriage was out of the question for Berry completely.

“I think we will get married just because, out of the people I’ve been married to, this is the person I should have married,” she added. “And I feel like I should, we should get married, but it’s not because we feel like we have to. I think it’s something that we would like to do just because we want that expression.”

The sentiment was one she reiterated in her conversation with The Cut. “After my third divorce, people started to say, ‘What’s wrong with her? She’s crazy. She can’t keep a man,'” she recalled to the outlet. “And I would always argue, ‘Who says I want to keep a man if he’s not the right man?’ I pretty much stopped doing interviews for a decade because I got tired of the same old story,” she continues. “It was always: ‘Poor Halle — Unlucky in Love Again.'”

The actress shared that before she met Hunt in 2020, she’d spent four years on a healing sabbatical from romance that included a wellness retreat in India and a lot of therapy.

“That’s when I realized I was just pulling in mirror images of myself — people who were broken, people with childhood wounds that weren’t addressed,” she said. “I had to face the pain of what happened to me as a kid and release my secrets. I had to get it out of my body so I could fully love myself and show up for my own children. I cried many a night.”

It turned out Hunt, too, had taken a two year-hiatus from relationships. “He was on his own self-discovery journey,” Berry recalled.

But after a long inner journey, the actress shared that she was finally in “the best relationship I have ever had.”

Berry shares a daughter, Nahla, with ex-boyfriend Gabriel Aubry, and a son Maceo, 11, with ex-husband Oliver Martinez, to whom she was married from 2013 to 2016. She was also previously married to former baseball pro David Justice from 1993 to 1997 and to musician Eric Benét from 2001 to 2005.

Hunt is dad to a son from a previous relationship