Benson Boone Tells Hilarious Story of Being Caught Pants-Down by a Fan Backstage

Some celebrity stories are polished. Some are PR-approved. And then there are the stories a star tells on a podcast at his own expense — the kind that make you like him more, not less. Benson Boone just handed us one of those, and it’s a doozy.

The 24-year-old “Beautiful Things” singer stopped by the Life Uncut Podcast recently and casually dropped a backstage tale from about two and a half years ago that involves a shared bathroom, a running gag with his friends, and a fan who got a whole lot more of Benson Boone than any meet-and-greet package ever promised. If you’ve ever had a mortifying bathroom encounter, congratulations — you now have something in common with one of pop music’s biggest stars.

The Set-Up: One Bathroom, Zero Privacy

Picture it. Two and a half years ago, Benson was still early in his life as a touring artist — that weird, scrappy era where the venues are big enough to matter but the logistics haven’t quite caught up with the fame. This was right around the time “Beautiful Things” was blowing up into one of the biggest songs on the planet, by the way. The machine was growing. The plumbing situation had not.

“Backstage I didn’t have a bathroom for some reason,” Benson explained on the podcast. “My bathroom that I had was shared with the audience bathroom. So, like, anyone in the audience could be in the bathroom that I was in, and I didn’t know that.”

Read that again and let it sink in. He’s telling you, the star of the show, to use the bathroom — and the bathroom is just… the bathroom. The same one the crowd uses. Nobody told him. He had no idea. If you’re the headliner and someone points you toward a door labeled with a little stick figure, you’re not exactly running a background check on the floor plan first. You’re just grateful you don’t have to hold it.

This is the kind of detail that only comes from the early-touring days, when you’re still figuring out how the whole circus works. Green rooms that are barely rooms. Corridors that all look the same. A bathroom that turns out to be communal in ways nobody volunteered to mention.

The Moment Everything Went Wrong

Now here’s where Benson’s friend group enters the story, and honestly, they deserve some credit here too. According to the singer, he and his buddies had a running gag — a bit, a ritual, a lifestyle choice, whatever you want to call it. They don’t do the normal guy thing of just unzipping and handling business.

No. They commit. Full commitment.

“Well, we do a thing where we just fully take off our pants,” Benson said, laughing his way through it. “And we’re standing there with a shirt on but no pants on. So I walk in there, drop the drawers. They are fully at my ankles, and I have started taking the piss. So once you start, you can’t stop or it hurts. Well, you can, but it’s like it’s really uncomfortable.”

So there he is: pants at his ankles, shirt on, mid-stream, in his own little world — in a bathroom he believes is private but is, in reality, open to anyone holding a ticket to his concert.

And then the door opens.

“So, I’m standing there and I’m, you know, kind of in my own world, just like doing my thing, taking a piss, and someone walks in and I didn’t look,” Benson recalled. “I didn’t look over because I assumed it would be like one of my mates, um, and it wasn’t. It was a fan coming to the show and he just stopped and goes, ‘huh,’ and I heard the gasp and that’s when I turned.”

The gasp. Can you imagine? You’re minding your own business backstage at a concert, you wander into the bathroom, and there — pants around his ankles, mid-song-era fame — is Benson Boone. The “huh” that came out of that fan is doing a lot of heavy lifting. That’s not a greeting. That’s a brain short-circuiting in real time.

And yes, the fan recognized him. Of course he did. “Beautiful Things” was everywhere. The voice, the face, the whole thing. There is no recovering anonymity when you’re standing there like that. You are, in every sense, exposed.

The Handshake (Yes, Really)

This is the part that elevates the story from mortifying to legendary, because it tells you everything about how Benson Boone handles chaos: with humor and a handshake.

“It was so awkward,” he admitted. “I was I was horrified. Luckily, great guy. He was super cool.”

And then — the detail that made the whole podcast moment — he shook the fan’s hand. Right there. Before washing his hands. He said it himself, with the kind of comedic timing you can’t teach: “I ended up pulling up my drawers and shaking his hand, before I washed my hands, by the way.”

There’s something genuinely charming about the way he tells it. No spin, no damage control, no publicist jumping in to reframe it as a “candid moment of connection with the fanbase.” Just a guy going, “Yeah, that happened. A fan saw my bare backside. I shook his hand. Moving on.”

That fan, by the way, is walking around with the single best concert story in the history of concert stories. “Yeah, I saw Benson Boone live” hits different when you mean it literally. He could dine out on that anecdote forever.

From Idol Walk-Off to Arena Headliner

For anyone who needs the refresher: Benson Boone’s rise has been one of the more improbable and fun trajectories in recent pop music. He first showed up on American Idol in 2021 — season 19 — and then did something almost nobody does: he walked away before the Top 24. At the time, people thought it was a wild call. In hindsight? Maybe the smartest move of his career.

He didn’t need the show. Later that same year he dropped “Ghost Town,” which introduced the world to that huge, soaring voice. And then came January 2024 and “Beautiful Things” — the kind of song that doesn’t just chart, it takes over. It went to number one in country after country, hit number two on the Billboard Hot 100, and turned Benson into a genuine global star practically overnight. The Grammy folks noticed too: he earned a Best New Artist nomination at the 2025 ceremony, which is basically the industry’s way of stamping your passport.

His debut album, Fireworks & Rollerblades, landed in April 2024, and he followed it with American Heart in 2025 — the record that sent him out on his first all-arena world tour, complete with the backflips that have become his signature move. Because apparently singing your face off wasn’t enough; the man had to do gymnastics mid-set too.

It’s worth remembering that the bathroom incident happened right in the middle of all this — that strange, dizzying window when you’re suddenly famous but the infrastructure of your life hasn’t caught up yet. The tour buses get nicer, the venues get bigger, but somewhere backstage there’s still a bathroom door with no lock and no warning. Fame is weird like that. One day you’re playing rooms where the green room is a hallway, the next you’re selling out arenas. The learning curve is steep, and occasionally it’s pants-down.

A Very Benson Boone 2026

If anything, 2026 has been the year Benson fully settled into headliner status. He opened Night 2 of the iHeartRadio Music Festival in September — shirt off, backflips on, the full spectacle — and he’s been out on his Wanted Man Tour, the 2026 run that’s been pulling big crowds and bigger singalongs.

His personal life has been making headlines too. Back in July, he was spotted kissing a mystery blonde woman ahead of a Denver concert, sending the internet into its usual overdrive of zoomed-in photos and speculation. And earlier this year, Alix Earle starred as his love interest in the theatrical music video for “Time of My Life,” a pairing that had everyone talking. The guy keeps busy, is what we’re saying.

But here’s the thing about this podcast story that lands so well: for all the arena tours and festival headlines and tabloid romance sightings, Benson Boone is still the same guy who’ll tell a room full of listeners about the time a fan walked in on him at his most vulnerable. That’s not a PR strategy. That’s just personality. In an era where so many pop stars are wrapped in layers of management and mystique, there’s something refreshing about a singer who treats his own embarrassment as premium content.

Plenty of artists have mortifying backstage stories. Most of them will take those stories to the grave. Benson put his on a podcast, laughed through it, and gave that fan the story of a lifetime in the process.

So the next time you’re at a Benson Boone show and nature calls — maybe double-check which bathroom you’re walking into. You never know who’s in there with his drawers at his ankles. And if it happens to be the headliner? He seems like the type who’d shake your hand about it.

Source: Just Jared