The Unlikely Person Who Inspired Benson Boone to Backflip

I had one question on my mind for Benson Boone: Sir, why are you always doing backflips? But the 22-year-old chart-topping artist behind the hit “Beautiful Things” was running late to our interview. I couldn’t blame him. Boone, as his publicist explained to me in an email, was “literally doing a flip.”

You see, backflipping has become Boone’s schtick, a staple for quite possibly every performance he’s ever done since his days on American Idol. Why and how did he learn? It turns out the talent runs in his family.

“My dad does flips—or did,” Boone, who’s partnering with Armani Beauty to support the launch of Stronger With You parfum, tells GQ. “I saw him do a backflip at a family barbecue. He did it off the neighbor’s balcony, and I was like ‘Hell yeah, dad, I’m gonna try that.’ And I was like four, so I just sent one off my couch, and it actually went surprisingly well.”

He tells us he’s been doing backflips everywhere since then, and he’s not lying. He did it (more than once) when he was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live in May. The sacred The Tonight Show desk was also a prime location for a flip on Wednesday. And we’d put money that he does it at least five times when he’s co-headlining Governors Ball in front of 150,000 music lovers this weekend—even if that crowd size is bigger than he’s used to.

“I was doing one of my first shows, I think it might have been in L.A., and it was a really, really, really tiny venue—maybe 100 people,” he says. “I was so new to performing. I had no idea what to do to entertain a crowd, so I was like ‘I could backflip.’ And I did a backflip, and then over the couple of small shows I would do a couple [backflips], and people were like, ‘I love the backflips!’ And so I just kept doing them until it turned into a bigger thing.”

“Bigger thing” these days means the countless memes of Boone backflipping in random situations, a phenomenon that may have even helped him sell out his upcoming arena tour for his sophomore album American Heart, due out on June 20. For the better half of 2025, Boone will be backflipping his way across 51 shows between North America and Europe. Will he ever stop defying gravity, the same way his dad did?

“Hopefully someday,” Boone says. “I don’t think I want to do backflips forever, you know?”