During the midpoint of that movie, Winona Ryder’s Mina Murray flees the influence of Dracula to be reunited with her weakened but living fiancé Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), and the two are soon married inside a Romanian Orthodox church. However, while promoting Destination “We actually got married in Dracula,” Ryder recently told Entertainment Weekly. “No, I swear to God I think we’re married in real life…. In that scene, Francis used a real Romanian priest. We shot the master and he did the whole thing. So I think we’re married.” EW reported at first Reeves smiled it off, deadpanning, “It’s lovely to see you again.” But when Ryder reminded him that they each said “I do” on a Valentine’s Day shoot in 1992, Reeves conceded, “Oh my gosh we’re married.” The filmmaker, who personally considers Greek Orthodox Christianity, which is also practiced in Romania, to be more beautiful and truer to the original rites of Christianity than the Roman Catholicism which he grew up with—something he described as “oppressive and mean” and having more to do with the Roman Empire than Christianity—felt compelled to film a real wedding ceremony between Ryder and Reeves after principal photography had concluded. “We didn’t have the scene on the first shoot,” Coppola recalled on the commentary. “I think we did it with one of those stylized ways where you didn’t really have anything but some shadows on the wall. And looking at the film, I decided having the real wedding ceremony as it might be in that religion would be beautiful.” So he filmed the whole ceremony at a Greek Orthodox church in Los Angeles. “This is pretty authentic and I think very beautiful, because we actually did the ceremony and had the priest do the ceremony. 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.” Read the Den of Geek SDCC 2018 Special Edition Magazine Here!
