The singer put a number on her family plans during her husband's podcast. Four kids, she said, inspired by a Diane Keaton dinner scene in The Family Stone. Then she admitted she has no idea whether it will happen.
Selena Gomez said she wants four children with Benny Blanco, and then, almost in the same breath, acknowledged that she might end up with one or none. The 33-year-old made the admission on the second episode of Friends Keep Secrets, the podcast Blanco co-hosts with rapper Lil Dicky and his wife, Kristin Batalucco. The episode aired on 3 March and became one of those unscripted moments that spread faster than anything the publicists planned.
Burd was asked first how many children he wanted. 'One, two max,' he said. Batalucco pushed it to three. Then Gomez cut in.
'I want four, but that's out there,' she said.
Out there is a generous way to put it. Having four children is a significant ambition for anyone. For Gomez, who has spoken publicly about the fact that she cannot carry her own children due to complications from lupus and a kidney transplant in 2017, the number carries a weight that a podcast clip does not fully convey. She told Vanity Fair in 2024 that she had grieved the inability to become pregnant and was open to surrogacy or adoption. Before meeting Blanco, she had planned to adopt a child by 35.
None of that came up explicitly on the podcast. What came up instead was a film.
A Holiday Film Doing The Heavy Lifting
Gomez traced her four-child dream to a specific scene in The Family Stone, the 2005 holiday film starring Diane Keaton as a matriarch presiding over a loud, complicated dinner with her grown children and their partners. Gomez said the character reminded her of her 'nana' and she could not get the image out of her head.
'One day at my dinner table, when I'm her age, I want to see that dinner table,' Gomez said.
'Whatever happens, happens. If we're only able to have one, none. I hope. We don't know. But my dream for sure was that scene where they're all at the dinner table, and they're just with their partners or their significant others or kids or single, and it's just like this beautiful cast of characters.'
'It's the community of family,' Batalucco added.
Gomez pulled the moment back before it tipped. 'So, it's actually going to be crazy hell until they become adults,' she said. The room laughed. Blanco laughed. The tension between the dream and the mess sat there, unresolved, and that is probably why the clip stuck.
The interesting thing about citing a film as the blueprint for a family is that films end. The dinner table in The Family Stone is a snapshot. It does not show the decades of work that produced it. Gomez seems to know that, which is why her language kept swinging between hope and hedging. 'Whatever happens, happens' is not the language of someone who has it figured out.
Blanco's Opinion About Fatherhood
Blanco, 37, has been open about wanting children since before the couple married. In a June 2025 interview with InStyle, he put it simply. 'I love kids; I love being an uncle,' he said. 'I want to be a dad, though, God willing. I'm just dreaming and praying every day.'
The couple wed on 27 September 2025 at Sea Crest Nursery in Santa Barbara, with around 170 guests. Burd officiated the ceremony, a detail Blanco revealed on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in late February. The man who married them is now the man sitting across from them on a podcast, discussing what comes next.
They bought a $35m Spanish-style estate in Beverly Hills earlier that year. Blanco described it to InStyle as the kind of place that feels lived-in rather than displayed. Whether it eventually holds the dinner table Gomez described is a question neither of them can answer yet.
Gomez chose a film scene as her reference point for the future. Not a number on a spreadsheet or a parenting manual, but a fictional dinner table full of noise and people who had once been children in that same house. The dream is vivid. The path to it is not. She said as much, and that honesty is what made the moment land.
