Publicity tours usually revolve around late-night talk show interviews and the occasional magazine cover story. But thankfully the press run of Destination Wedding has been nothing short of delightful and dishy, mainly because of the long-simmering sexual tension playing out between Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves.
The two actors, who play bitter single people stuck with each other at a destination wedding in Napa, have known each other for a long time. They first met in 1989 at the Independent Spirit Awards, where Winona recently admitted that she had a “pretty healthy crush on him.” Keanu immediately added: “I had a healthy crush on you, too.”
A few years later, the two were starring in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film, Dracula, and according to Winona, they might have accidentally tied the knot on set during a wedding scene between their two characters. “No, I swear to God, I think we’re married in real life,” she said. “In that scene, Francis used a real Romanian priest,” she ads. “We shot the master and he did the whole thing. So I think we’re married.” Reeves then asked whether they said yes to their vows, to which Winona responds: “Don’t you remember that? It was on Valentine’s Day.” Clearly, someone still thinks about that day with fond memories!
After Dracula, the two went on to star in A Scanner Darkly, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, and now Destination Wedding. Perhaps their past collaborations are why Winona specifically requested Keanu as her co-star in their upcoming late-summer rom-com. Or perhaps it’s because even three decades after meeting each other, these two clearly have some sort of unresolved feelings. Their sexual tension was most clearly laid out in this Vanity Fair interview, where Winona admitted to writing about Keanu in her diary, compared themselves to Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, and when asked whether they would like to keep working together, left little room to argue that they are very much into one another:
“My hope is to do many more movies with him,” she said.
“We could do horror, a political thriller? Want to do a period film? You could play a 60s culture revolutionary?” Keanu asks. “We’re futuristics intellectuals. How about you’re the amazing poet / painter, and I get to be the drunk guy?” Winona, less than enthused about those possibilities says no.
“You want to just fight and fuck?” asks Keanu. “Fight and fuck?!” Winona asks. “Think. Fight. Fuck,” he replies.
“I like it,” she says. “Where do I sign?”
Yowza! Watch the trailer for Destination Wedding below.
