Taylor Lautner is going to be a dad. The Twilight star, 34, and his wife Tay Lautner, 29, announced Thursday that they are expecting their first child together.
Lautner shared a series of maternity photos on Instagram that show the couple in a field, holding up sonogram images, with Lautner bending down to kiss Tay’s pregnant belly.
The caption they chose was exactly what you would expect from two people who have spent years making the shared-name joke central to their public identity, “What’s better than two Taylor Lautners? 🤍”
It landed. The post immediately blew up, drawing tens of thousands of comments from fans who have followed the couple since Lautner first emerged from a step back from his acting career and found the woman his sister had been insisting he needed to meet.
How Did Lautner And His Wife Meet?
The story of how Taylor Lautner met his wife is one of the better celebrity meet-cute stories in recent memory, mostly because it involved a setup so transparent that Tay walked into it without realizing it was a setup at all.
Lautner’s younger sister Makena Moore called him during his break from acting, a period he later described as deliberately pulling back to “enjoy life and spend some time with my family and friends,” and proposed a game night.
The pitch was simple. Throw a game night, invite her and some friends, she’d bring Tay.
That would be it. “She’ll just be one of them, and you guys can just meet,” Lautner recalled on The Kelly Clarkson Show. “We hit it off.”
What Makena told her brother at the time was considerably less subtle. “She’s like, ‘Dude, I found your future wife. You need to meet this girl,'” Lautner recalled to People. “And the rest is history.”
Tay, born Taylor Dome, did not know it was a setup until later. When she found out, the version of the story that gets told now is that Makena had already decided Tay was her brother’s future wife from the moment they met. As it turned out, she was right.
When Did The Lautners Make It Official?
The couple first went Instagram official in September 2018, when Tay posted a photo of them together at what she called “WEDDING SZN (Not ours tho hehe).”
They dated quietly for three years before Lautner proposed in November 2021, posting photos to Instagram of himself on one knee in front of a fireplace, surrounded by rose petals and candles, with a neon sign behind them spelling out “LAUTNER.” Tay’s hands were over her mouth.
He captioned the post, “11.11.2021. And just like that, all of my wishes came true.”
She posted the same image to her own account with the caption, “my absolute best friend. I CANNOT WAIT TO SPEND FOREVER WITH YOU.” Lautner replied in her comments: “Got news for you, the feeling is mutual.”
They married on November 11, 2022, 11.11.22, at Epoch Estate Wines in California’s wine country, near Paso Robles.
The date was not accidental. The venue, the symmetry of the date, the intimacy of the guest list. “Everything felt so surreal,” Tay told People after the wedding. “We were both very involved in the process so we had high expectations, but it exceeded them for sure.”
“We just wanted the day to feel celebratory, no pressure or anxiety,” Lautner added. “Everybody there meant so much to us and we wanted all of them to be part of the day.”
Before the wedding, Lautner had announced publicly that Tay would be taking his last name, which meant both of them would legally be named Taylor Lautner.
He addressed the obvious question about how this worked in daily life on The Kelly Clarkson Show in 2022, “A lot of people just do ‘boy Tay’ and ‘girl Tay.’ Either Taylor and Tay, or boy Tay, girl Tay, works.”
They have gotten a lot of mileage out of the shared name. When Taylor Swift enlisted Lautner for her “I Can See You” music video at the Eras Tour in Kansas City in July 2023, Swift addressed the name situation directly, “He and his wife have become some of my closest friends, and it’s very convenient because we all share the same first name.”
Tay, for her part, has described herself as an “OG fan” of Swift, she went to one of the singer’s earliest concerts at a small theater. The three Taylors have made the friendship work.
Who Is Tay Lautner?
If you have only encountered Tay through her husband’s profile, you are missing a significant portion of the story.
Tay Dome graduated from nursing school in 2019 and became a registered nurse just as the COVID-19 pandemic began.
She worked through the height of the pandemic, a period she has described as the most difficult of her life.
The intensity and trauma of that work led to her developing depression, anxiety, and severe PTSD that ultimately forced her to leave her nursing career.
She posted about Taylor Lautner’s support during nursing school in a tribute that has become one of the more circulated things she has ever written,
“Thank you for encouraging me when I felt like quitting. Thank you for all the meals you’d make me when I was too busy studying. Thank you for quizzing me and trying to pronounce medical terms and abbreviations. Thank you for your calming hugs when I would be getting an anxiety attack. Thank you for supporting me endlessly. You mean the world to me & I wouldn’t be where I am today without you.”
Out of her pandemic experience, she built something. In 2022, she launched The Lemons Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to mental health support and ending stigma around mental illness.
The name comes from the phrase she adopted as her personal framework: when life gives you lemons, what do you do with them? The foundation was formalized the same year she married.
In February 2023, the couple launched The Squeeze, a podcast co-hosted by both Taylors that covers mental health, wellness, and personal stories from celebrities and guests across different backgrounds.
The show regularly lands in the top rankings of the mental health podcast category and has been featured on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, The Kelly Clarkson Show, CBS Mornings, and The Today Show.
In 2024, Tay appeared on the SHE MD podcast and opened up about her health more broadly, including a breast cancer scare and her experience with what she described as post-birth-control syndrome, a topic she has spoken about publicly in the context of her concerns about fertility.
The Fertility Conversation They Had Openly
The pregnancy announcement did not come out of nowhere for people who follow the couple closely. In January 2025, Tay addressed her fertility concerns directly on The Squeeze.
She described how the fear of not being able to conceive had “grew with me as I got older,” tied to her long-term birth control use and the questions she had raised about its effects on her ability to conceive in the future.
She had recently had an appointment with her OB-GYN and had received what she described as a reassuring update, “I got a lot of eggs.”
The episode, a January 2025 solo catch-up that also covered the couple’s reaction to the Los Angeles fires and their commitment to celebrating small moments, was notable for how directly she addressed fertility as a source of ongoing anxiety, even after getting good news.
The Squeeze episode from the same period also referenced them doing a “franchise marathon” date night, rewatching Twilight together, something Taylor had not done in years.
He talked about what it was like watching the films back as an adult, more than a decade removed from making them.
“Sometimes we get a little nervous,” Tay told Us Weekly in 2024, speaking about the prospect of raising children. “How do we raise kids [who] are going to be able to speak up for themselves or feel like they can talk to us about this? It scares me.”
Taylor Lautner’s Career Then And Now
Lautner has been publicly clear that his relationship with his career has shifted significantly since the Twilight years. He rose to global fame as Jacob Black, the werewolf and central love interest to Bella Swan, across five films from 2008 to 2012.
At the height of that franchise, he was the highest-paid teen actor in Hollywood. He also starred in Valentine’s Day (2010), Abduction (2011), Grown Ups 2 (2013), the BBC sitcom Cuckoo (2014-2018), Scream Queens (2016), and the 2022 Netflix film Home Team alongside Kevin James.
He has been candid about stepping away deliberately. “I wanted to take a step back and enjoy life and spend some time with my family and friends,” he said in 2022. “And I met my fiancée out of it, so it all worked out.”
More recently, his public presence has been built primarily around The Squeeze, where he co-hosts with Tay and has spoken openly about his own mental health, his experience with anxiety, and his evolution as a person beyond the Jacob Black image.
He has described watching his wife build the foundation and navigate her post-pandemic mental health as one of the most formative experiences of his adult life.
He has also, it should be noted, been asked many times whether the couple would have children.
His answer has been consistent for years. “Yes, I absolutely love kids, I love family,” he told Entertainment Tonight in 2016. “So, one day, I very much look forward to that.”
That day is now confirmed.
No due date has been shared. Baby name speculation on social media has predictably centered on whether a child of two Taylor Lautners might be named Taylor.
The couple has not addressed this, though the Instagram caption, “What’s better than two Taylor Lautners?,” suggests they are at minimum aware of the conversation.
