As we all know by now, we live in the weird timeline. But there’s one thing about living in a bizarre dimension that isn’t that bad, and it’s this: Twenty-six years ago Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves might have accidentally become husband and wife.
While doing press with EW for their upcoming rom com Destination Wedding — their fourth film together — Ryder and Reeves were naturally asked about their feelings about weddings. Ryder then revealed that the two had apparently been married in real life.
“We actually got married in Dracula,” Ryder said, alluding to Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. “No, I swear to god, I think we’re actually married in real life.”
In the film, from 1992, Ryder played Mina, fiancée of Reeves’ Jonathan Harker, the poor solicitor who went to visit Gary Oldman’s Count and came back nearly-possessed and gray-haired, if with his legendarily awful English accent intact. Before a hot and bothered Mina ditches her boring human beloved to get busy with Dracula, the two wed in a fantastically ornate ceremony. Problem is, it wasn’t all movie magic.
“In that scene, Francis used a real Romanian priest,” Ryder explained. “We shot the master and he did the whole thing. So I think we’re married.” Reeves tried to joke it away, cracking, “It’s lovely to see you again.” But Ryder persisted, pointing out that they even exchanged “I do”s in front of a real priest. That left Reeves with nothing to say but, “Oh my god, we’re married!”
Here’s where we get to play the buzzkill and point out that they were in character, for one thing; if anyone was married it was the fictitious Mina and Jonathan Harker. Then there’s a ton of legal mumbo-jumbo we don’t feel knowledgeable enough to delve into. But whatever! As they say, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend — a principle we can stand by long as it involves celebrities maybe being spouses..
This news, for the record, has been on Dracula’s Internet Movie Database trivia page for years, though the greater internet didn’t seem to notice till now. Neither Ryder nor Reeves — both enjoying their own concurrent and very welcome renaissances, thanks to Stranger Things and John Wick, respectively — have ever been married, incidentally. We’ll bet that their probable fake marriage — largely spent apart, with them only occasionally seeing each other on films like Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly and Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee — is better than most. So let’s ignore pesky facts and offer the lovely couple a warm congrats!
