Are Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves Really Married? Why the ‘Stranger Things’ Actress Thinks So

The hearts of Gen X movie fans likely skipped a beat when Winona Ryder announced last summer that she was married to Keanu Reeves. Or she thought she was married to Reeves. Maybe.

While it seems fitting that two of the most memorable actors of the ‘80s and ‘90s would get hitched, could it possibly be true that the stars of Heathers and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure had secretly married without anyone knowing about it? Well, not exactly. It turns out that Reeves and Ryder aren’t romantically involved, but that they might be legally wed.

It all goes back to Dracula  

https://youtu.be/WhQ7QlMiOII

Ryder and Reeves co-starred together in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation of Dracula. Ryder played Mina and Reeves played her fiancé Jonathan Harker. In the film, there’s a scene where the couple get married. And according to Ryder, the wedding wasn’t just a show for the cameras. It was the real thing.

“We actually got married in Dracula. No, I swear to god I think we’re married in real life,” the Stranger Things actress told Entertainment Weekly in an interview in August 2018. “In that scene, Francis [Ford Coppola] used a real Romanian priest. We shot the master and he did the whole thing. So I think we’re married.”

Reeves and Ryder were doing a joint interview to promote their new movie, Destination Wedding. But the John Wick star sadly didn’t have as vivid a memory of the big day as his bride.

“We said yes?” Reeves asked Ryder, who responded that they had. “Oh my gosh, we’re married,” Reeves replied.

Francis Ford Coppola says Ryder might be right

After the interview, Coppola backed up Ryder’s assertion that the wedding filmed for Dracula was real.

The director wasn’t satisfied with the original wedding scene shot for the movie, so he had the actors redo it at a Greek Orthodox church in Los Angeles. “[W]e actually did the ceremony and had the priest do the ceremony,” Coppola told the Guardian. “So in a sense, when we were all done, we realized that Keanu and Winona really are married as a result of this scene and this ceremony.”

Ryder calls Reeves her “husband”

Ryder and Reeves — who also appeared together in the movies A Scanner Darkly and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee — seem to be having fun with the idea that they could be married. In a recent interview, Reeves revealed that the actress sometimes calls him “husband” in text messages.

While they’re not a couple in real-life, Reeves and Ryder have been platonic pals for a long time. Way back in 1993, Reeves named Ryder, along with Johnny Depp, River Phoenix, and Drew Barrymore as some of his closest friends.

And the two have since admitted to each crushing on the other when they were younger. “I had a pretty big, healthy crush on him,” Ryder, 46, told ET, to which Reeves replied, “I had a big, healthy crush on you too.”

Maybe a real-life wedding could be in the cards after all?