Dan Reynolds Opens Up About Being Expelled From BYU — and Finds Himself in the Middle of a New Romance Rumor

A candid confession about faith and consequence

Dan Reynolds has never been shy about the tension between his upbringing and the life he lives now. This week, the Imagine Dragons frontman added another chapter to that story, telling a street reporter that he was expelled from Brigham Young University after confessing to a bishop that he had been intimate with his girlfriend.

In the interview, published by reporter Kate Mackz on Wednesday, October 28, the 39-year-old explained that he spent two years serving a Mormon mission in Nebraska before enrolling at BYU, the Utah school with close ties to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a strict honor code that forbids premarital sex. “I got kicked out ’cause I confessed to having sex with my girlfriend to my bishop,” he said. What followed, according to Reynolds, was a yearlong repentance process — reading scripture, praying, and waiting to be forgiven.

His verdict on the experience is blunt: “It is not something I would recommend to any kid to ever have to go through. It was not a good experience.” Reynolds also noted that he is “not religious anymore,” a position that will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the band’s lyrics, where doubt, guilt and spiritual searching have long been recurring themes.

Why it matters for Imagine Dragons

Reynolds has sold more than 74 million albums worldwide with Imagine Dragons, the Las Vegas pop-rock band he fronts alongside guitarist Wayne Sermon and bassist Ben McKee. But his personal history has always bled into the music. Songs like “Believer” — one of three Imagine Dragons tracks Billboard ranked among the best-performing rock songs of the 2010s — trade in the language of pain and transformation, and Reynolds’ willingness to narrate his own struggles has become part of the band’s public identity.

• Reynolds has previously spoken openly about living with depression, anxiety and autoimmune conditions, telling Us in 2019 that “we’re all humans.”
• He shares four children with ex-wife Aja Volkman; the two musicians were married from 2011 to 2024.
• Imagine Dragons’ most recent album, Loom, arrived in 2024 — the band’s first without longtime drummer Daniel Platzman.

The BYU revelation fits a pattern: Reynolds has used his platform less to sermonize than to show the messiness underneath the success — something he framed in that 2019 interview as his “biggest goal.”

Meanwhile, the tabloids have a new theory

The music news cycle being what it is, the interview landed in the same week that Reynolds’ social life became tabloid fodder. Over the weekend, he was photographed at Cipriani in Beverly Hills holding hands across the table with actress Sofía Vergara, the Modern Family star. According to reports, the two were not alone — businesswoman Anastasia Soare and an unidentified male friend joined them — and they left through the restaurant’s back door around 12:30 a.m.

The sighting came shortly after Reynolds’ split from actress Minka Kelly, reportedly after four years of dating. Sources also placed the two at a star-studded birthday party, where onlookers got the impression they were a couple. When asked about the Imagine Dragons frontman on Monday in Beverly Hills, Vergara declined to answer — fixing her hair and staying silent — which, in the language of celebrity press, is neither confirmation nor denial.

The bigger picture

For the band’s fans, the romance rumors are noise; the interview is the signal. Reynolds has built a career on turning private turmoil into arena-sized anthems, and his account of being expelled from college and put through a year of repentance is another piece of that origin story — a reminder that the voice behind “Radioactive” and “Thunder” was shaped, in part, by a institution that judged him and a decision to walk away from it.

Imagine Dragons continue to be one of the most commercially dominant rock acts of the streaming era, with 160 billion streams to their name and a place as the first rock band with four songs surpassing one billion streams each. Whether the next album draws on this chapter remains to be seen. But if history is any guide, don’t be surprised if it does.