Celebrity

Taylor Kinney: 5 Things You Should Know About Lady Gaga's Fiancé

The Chicago Fire actor tells PEOPLE that portraying a firefighter is like playing "a knight in shining armor"

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Published on February 17, 2015 03:45 PM

Taylor Kinney is the man who went gaga for Lady Gaga, but there’s a lot more to the smoldering actor than the pop star he is engaged to.

Here are five things you should know about the man who stole Lady Gaga’s heart:

1. He looks good in a uniform.
The former Vampire Diaries actor, 33, played a paramedic on NBC’s short-lived Trauma and a U.S. Navy SEAL in the Academy Award-nominated Zero Dark Thirty and currently stars as Lt. Kelly Severide on NBC’s Chicago Fire.

Kinney told PEOPLE in 2013 that firefighters are “likened to a modern-day hero. These people run into burning buildings and their job is to save people in peril, so there is that idea of a knight in shining armor.”

2. He isn’t afraid to cry.
“He’s the first man that I have dated that, when I sing onstage, he cries,” Gaga, 28, told the U.K.’s The Times of Kinney’s sweet devotion. “That means more to me than anything.”

And his softer side doesn’t stop at tears.

Gaga also described Kinney – whom she met on the set of her “You and I” music video in 2011 – as someone who is “supportive of everything I do.”

3. He proudly lets his freak flag fly.
Gaga told Ellen DeGeneres that Kinney is a “hidden weirdo.”

“He is extremely strange, actually. We complement each other’s weirdness. That’s actually one of the first things he ever said to me. It’s a Dr. Seuss quote. You find in someone else a compatible weirdness,” Gaga said on the comedian’s talk show in 2013.

4. He follows his heart.
Kinney and his three brothers were raised by their dental hygienist mother in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

During his sophomore year at West Virginia University, Kinney took an elective theater course that “held my interest outside of the classroom more so than any other subject I’d ever taken,” he told USA Today in 2012.

According to the publication, Kinney left school after his junior year and moved to Hawaii, where he learned to surf, skydive and frame houses. After a year, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting.

5. He and Lady Gaga are "best friends."
“Having your lover be your best friend is the best thing ever,” Gaga told DeGeneres in 2013. “We’re boys. I wear his flannels and we eat pizza and watch TV. And then I play him my next single. He likes it, and that’s our normal life.”