Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s Onscreen Wedding Is Big Drama. These 8 Real-Life Unions Have Them Beat.

Any wedding involving one of the world’s richest men was bound to make news. But Bezos and Sánchez’s starry three-day celebration in Venice sparked major backlash among the Italian locals concerned for their floating home: Venice has sunk about 10 inches in the last century as water levels around it have also risen, and an influx of visitors, they worried, would exacerbate the situation. “Let’s make sure that Venice is not remembered as a postcard venue where Bezos had his wedding but as the city that did not bend to oligarchs,” protester Na Haby Stella Faye said at the time, according to The New York Times. “We have a chance to disrupt a $10 million wedding—let’s do it.”

Reuters reported that security concerns stemming from the locals’ pre-wedding protests prompted the bride and groom to change their wedding-party venue. From June 26 to 28, the city was plastered with posters featuring Bezos’s head on a rocket and messages like this one: “In the time it takes to read this, Jeff Bezos’ wealth has increased more than your monthly salary.”

The Amazon founder and Sánchez, a former TV journalist, hoped to placate residents by sourcing about 80% of their supplies from Venetian vendors, according to the Associated Press. Additionally, the couple asked their guests not to give them anything, and said they would make financial donations to three Venice organizations in lieu of wedding gifts.

Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker (2022)

Among the guests at the Bezos-Sánchez wedding were Kim Kardashian, Kris Jenner, and Kylie Jenner, who all attended a similar Italian wedding three years earlier. The nuptials of Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker, hosted at a villa in Portofino, Italy, on May 22, 2022, included a musical performance by Andrea Bocelli, father of Matteo, who sang for Bezos and Sánchez’s wedding ceremony and reception.

But Kardashian and Barker’s wedding is better known for its apparent Dolce & Gabbana brand integration—the fashion house designed the bride’s wedding looks and the seaside villa where the couple exchanged their vows was owned by Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana. (The brand denied reports that it had exclusively sponsored the wedding, and said that it was only “hosting” the event.) Less than six months later, Kim curated Dolce & Gabbana’s spring 2023 collection, which was unveiled in a Milan fashion show. “It feels awful that my sister used my wedding as a business opportunity,” Kourtney said on the third season of their Hulu reality series The Kardashians. “It’s legit copying my wedding.”

Kim, in turn, accused Kourtney of mimicking her own 2014 nuptials to Kanye West in what became a viral meme. “I got married in Italy. Am I saying you copied me by getting married in Italy?” Kim tells the camera. “Who performed at my wedding? Andrea Bocelli. Who performed at Kourtney’s wedding? Andrea Bocelli.” She added, “You stole my f-cking wedding country and my wedding performer. Andrea Bocelli is my favorite male singer of all time, but I’m copying her dolce vita lifestyle. Okay.” The sisters have since agreed to disagree on this matter.

Brooklyn Beckham and Nicola Peltz (2022)

Family drama also plagued the union of American heir/actor Nicola Peltz and Brooklyn Beckham, the eldest son of retired footballer David Beckham and Spice Girl turned fashion designer Victoria Beckham. A month after their April 9, 2022, wedding, held in Palm Beach, Florida, People published a report from an anonymous source claiming that Peltz felt her big day was “ruined” after Beckham family friend Marc Anthony called Victoria up to dance with Brooklyn, branding her the “most beautiful woman in the room tonight,” a remark that left guests “in absolute shock.” (At the time, Victoria and David did not respond to the outlet’s request for comment.)

In a lengthy statement posted to his Instagram Stories on January 19 of this year, Brooklyn confirmed the rumor of Victoria “hijack[ing] my first dance with my wife,” adding of his mother: “She danced very inappropriately on me in front of everyone. I’ve never felt more uncomfortable or humiliated in my entire life.”

Brooklyn, who also took Peltz’s name when he married her, then clarified a previous report alleging that Victoria had initially offered to design Peltz’s wedding gown, only to cancel late in the process “despite how excited she was to wear her design, forcing her to urgently find a new dress,” wrote Brooklyn. Around the time of the wedding, Vogue reported that the custom Valentino wedding gown she ended up wearing was the “culmination of a year’s worth of conversations” between the bride and the team of then creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli.

According to Brooklyn, financial conversations regarding Brooklyn’s marriage to Peltz, daughter of billionaire Nelson Peltz, were a crucial sticking point in the eventual estrangement between Brooklyn and his parents. “Weeks before our big day, my parents repeatedly pressured and attempted to bribe me into signing away the rights to my name, which would have affected me, my wife, and our future children,” he claimed on Instagram. “They were adamant on me signing before my wedding date because then the terms of the deal would be initiated. My holdout affected the payday, and they have never treated me the same since.”

Victoria and David were notably absent from their eldest child’s vow renewal in August, which Brooklyn said was “so we could create new memories of our wedding day that bring us joy and happiness, not anxiety and embarrassment.” (The Beckhams did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment at the time of Brooklyn’s Instagram statements.)

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle (2018)

Another couple who navigated family issues ahead of their wedding day? The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who eventually began severing ties with the groom’s royal family following drama involving a disagreement about Princess Charlotte’s bridesmaid dress that caused a rift between Markle and Kate Middleton. Tabloids initially claimed that Markle had made Middleton cry, but Markle and Prince Harry have both publicly claimed that the opposite was true.

Days before the wedding, it was revealed that Meghan’s father, Thomas Markle Sr., worked with a paparazzo to stage photos of himself appearing to prepare for the royal wedding. Amid the scandal, Thomas announced he would not attend the wedding to avoid embarrassing the royal family, changed his mind, then finally backed out again citing necessary heart surgery. Prince Charles stepped in to walk Meghan down the aisle—but not before her father’s name had already been printed in the program. “The Order of Service was produced before it became clear that Mr. Thomas Markle would be unable to attend on medical advice,” the palace’s statement read, adding, “As a result, some aspects will be different to what has been printed.”

Also missing from the royal wedding was Ashleigh Hale, Meghan’s niece and the biological daughter of Samantha Markle, Meghan’s half sister. Hale is Samantha’s biological daughter, but she lived with her paternal grandparents from the age of two, and they later adopted her. In the Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan, Meghan said she and Hale reconnected in the late 2000s and became close friends during her years on Suits. According to Markle, she was unable to invite Hale to her and Harry’s wedding because the Kensington Palace press team worried it might cause more press scrutiny if they invited some members of the Markle family but not others. “They just couldn’t wrap their heads around it, and I have compassion for it,” she said. “How do we explain that this half sister isn’t invited to the wedding, but that the half sister’s daughter is? And so, with Ashleigh, the guidance at the time was to not have her come to our wedding.”

In 2021, Markle told Oprah Winfrey that she and Harry had already exchanged vows three days prior to their televised wedding, which was watched by nearly 2 billion people worldwide on May 19, 2018. “We were both aware in advance that this wasn’t our day,” said Markle, “this was the day planned for the world.”

Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds (2012)

Despite the fact that Lively is from California and Reynolds hails from Canada, the two actors inexplicably chose to tie the knot on September 9, 2012, at Boone Hall Plantation and Gardens in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. The historical site has been featured in Hollywood films like The Notebook, but also carries a dark history of slavery that Reynolds and Lively have since apologized for showcasing.

When the wedding faced renewed criticism following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the pair donated $200,000 to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and issued a joint Instagram statement addressing their actions. “We’re ashamed that in the past we’ve allowed ourselves to be uninformed about how deeply rooted systemic racism is…. We want to educate ourselves about other people’s experiences and talk to our kids about everything, all of it…especially our own complicity,” they said. “We talk about our bias, blindness and our own mistakes. We look back and see so many mistakes which have led us to deeply examine who we are and who we want to become.”

Later that year, Reynolds expressed further regret over their choice of locale. “It’s something we’ll always be deeply and unreservedly sorry for,” he told Fast Company in 2020. “It’s impossible to reconcile. What we saw at the time was a wedding venue on Pinterest. What we saw after was a place built upon devastating tragedy.” The couple has since renewed their vows at home. “Shame works in weird ways,” Reynolds continued. “A giant f-cking mistake like that can either cause you to shut down or it can reframe things and move you into action. It doesn’t mean you won’t f-ck up again. But repatterning and challenging lifelong social conditioning is a job that doesn’t end.” Lively recently reiterated her regrets during a deposition as part of her ongoing legal battle with It Ends With Us collaborator Justin Baldoni.

And that wasn’t the only mishap around Lively and Reynolds’s wedding. The bride was apparently so entranced by the musical talent that she let her dress get too close to a sparkler. “Florence Welch was singing at the reception, and they brought out these sparklers, and I’m watching her sing. I look down and my wedding dress has a big burn mark from one of the sparklers. Right on the front! And it was just so heartbreaking to me,” Lively told Vogue in 2014.

It was Reynolds who positively reframed the incident for his wife. “Later, my dress was hanging up and Ryan said, ‘Isn’t that beautiful?’ I said, ‘What?’ And he pointed to the burn. My heart just stopped, because it was such a sensitive little subject,” Lively recounted. “And he said, ‘You’ll always remember that moment with Florence singing and the sparklers. You have that forever, right there, preserved.’ Now that’s my favorite part of the dress.”

John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette (1996)

A bridal gown malfunction was also said to befall Bessette, whose September 21, 1996 nuptials to JFK Jr. were recently recreated on FX’s Love Story, starring actors Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly as the famous couple. According to JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography, designer Narciso Rodriguez, who met Bessette while they were working together at Calvin Klein, had to reopen and re-close the $40,000 wedding dress he had gifted her in order to get it on her before she walked down the aisle at the historic First African Baptist Church on Cumberland Island, a secluded isle off the coast of Georgia. Rodriguez, however, recently denied to The Cut that there had been a wardrobe malfunction: “I’ve heard so many amazing stories—the dress didn’t fit, people that were present weren’t present. It was just her and I in the bathroom, putting this dress over her head. I guess it comes with the lore.”

JFK Jr. and Bessette held their rehearsal dinner and reception at the Greyfield Inn, a former Carnegie family home and the only business on the island. It took six months of planning and “the skill of James Bond and the whole CIA,” to pull it off, Letitia Baldrige—who was the White House chief of staff to Jackie Kennedy—told People. To keep things further under the radar, wedding invites were sent out the Tuesday before the ceremony, The New York Times reported in 1996.

Although Love Story suggests that there was tension between Bessette and John’s sister, Caroline Kennedy (played by Grace Gummer in the show), at their wedding day, Sasha Chermayeff, one of 40 guests in attendance at the actual wedding, recently told Page Six that there was no noticeable ill will between the two on that day. But, as revealed in JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography, Carole Radziwill—a friend of the couple’s and wife to Anthony Radziwill, John’s cousin and best man—said Carolyn’s mom, Ann Messina Freeman, gave a toast at the rehearsal dinner that provided her daughter with “a cautionary tale.” Despite some reported familial rumblings and a wardrobe malfunction that slightly delayed the ceremony, JFK Jr. and Bessette were able to keep their wedding mostly secret from the press—sharing just a single official photo.

Madonna and Sean Penn (1985)

Less successful in maintaining their privacy were Madonna and Sean Penn, who married on August 16, 1985—her 27th birthday and a day before his 25th. They wed on a bluff overlooking the Pacific at the Malibu home of Elda and Dan Unger, friends of Penn’s parents, selected in part for its supposed privacy. But even painstaking security measures didn’t stop choppers from flying over the wedding site. According to the Times of London, Penn fired off his .45 at the helicopters and inscribed “FUCK OFF” on the beach below the Ungers’ home in an attempt to deter photographers.

“I liked his public demonstrations of protecting me,” Madonna told Vanity Fair in 1991. “In retrospect, I understand why he dealt with the press the way he did, but you have to realize it’s a losing battle. It’s not going to get you anywhere, and I don’t think Sean can give that up. He’ll defend you to the death—it’s irrational, but also noble.”

Madonna filed for divorce from Penn in January 1989. “It’s a big loss,” Madonna told VF two years later. “But let’s face it—Sean and I had problems. We had this high-visibility life, and that had a lot to do with the demise of the marriage. When you’re always being watched, you almost want to kill each other.” The exes have reunited multiple times since then, even auctioning off wedding photos as part of Miami Art Basel in 2016.

Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher (1959)

Before Taylor Swift reportedly ties the knot with Travis Kelce this summer, she would do well to learn from mistakes made by one of her musical muses. Elizabeth Taylor married eight times, but the most scandalous may have been her wedding to fourth husband Eddie Fisher on May 12, 1959. Two years earlier, Fisher served as best man at Taylor’s wedding to third husband Mike Todd on February 2, 1957. Meanwhile, Fisher’s then wife, Debbie Reynolds, was named Taylor’s maid of honor.

After Todd was killed in a plane crash in March 1958, Taylor began an affair with Fisher. Reynolds and Fisher divorced in 1959, and he married Taylor weeks after. (Taylor famously left him for her Cleopatra costar Richard Burton in 1963.) “In the long run,” Reynolds wrote in 2013’s Unsinkable: A Memoir. “Elizabeth did me a big, big favor.” Despite the scandal, Reynolds and Taylor buried the hatchet years later, and starred together in the 2001 film These Old Broads. The 2024 HBO documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes featured a clip of Taylor reflecting on the “grief-stricken” decision to marry Fisher, calling it “one big, friggin’ awful mistake.”