The Julia Roberts Wedding: Taos at Midnight, and the Film Weddings That Made Her Hollywood's Bride

For someone who has spent the better part of four decades as the cinema's most reliable bride, Julia Roberts has been remarkably relaxed about her own weddings. On screen she has picked colours called blush and bashful, plotted against her best friend's big day, bolted from altar after altar, and schemed to stop her daughter's wedding in Bali. Off screen she has married twice, both times with a minimum of fuss and both times a long way from a ballroom. The first was in a Lutheran church in small-town Indiana in 1993, arranged in two days. The second was on her own ranch outside Taos, New Mexico, at midnight on the Fourth of July 2002, in front of guests who thought they had come for a barbecue.

The distance between those two sets of weddings is the most interesting thing about the Julia Roberts wedding, and it is why this piece puts them side by side. The films sold a generation the big wedding. The woman herself chose pale pink, candlelight and a guest list that could have sat at one long table. Read the films closely and they agree with her more often than you would expect: in most of them, the grand wedding is the problem and the small one is the happy ending.

Indian readers have reasons of their own to pay attention. Roberts shot the India chapter of Eat Pray Love at an ashram in Pataudi, a longish drive from Delhi, and told Elle in 2010 that she was "definitely a practicing Hindu".¹ And the dilemmas in her films, from the friend who takes over the pre-wedding lunch with a song to the parents who must give their blessing and mean it, will be familiar to anyone who has sat through a family WhatsApp group in the month before a shaadi.

The quick answer: Julia Roberts married cameraman Daniel "Danny" Moder at a midnight ceremony in the first hours of 4 July 2002, at her ranch outside Taos, New Mexico. Roughly 50 to 60 family members and friends had been invited to a Fourth of July party and were not told a wedding was planned; her publicist confirmed only "a midnight ceremony before family and friends." Roberts wore a pale pink dress embroidered with pearls and antique beads rather than white. It was her second wedding. Her first, to country singer Lyle Lovett, took place on 27 June 1993 at St. James Lutheran Church in Marion, Indiana, was planned in two days, and ended in divorce 21 months later. On screen, Roberts has been the bride, the maid of honour, a wedding guest or the mother of the bride in Steel Magnolias (1989), My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), Runaway Bride (1999), Notting Hill (1999), Eat Pray Love (2010) and Ticket to Paradise (2022). In July 2026 she and Moder were guests at her niece Emma Roberts's wedding in Sun Valley, Idaho.

In this article

1. The Taos wedding: midnight on 4 July 2002
2. The Julia Roberts wedding dress: pale pink, not white
3. The first wedding: Marion, Indiana, 1993
4. Steel Magnolias (1989): blush, bashful and an armadillo
5. My Best Friend's Wedding (1997): the song at the lunch
6. Runaway Bride (1999): the bride who did not know her eggs
7. Notting Hill (1999): a goat on the cake
8. Eat Pray Love (2010): an Indian wedding, filmed in Pataudi
9. Ticket to Paradise (2022): a Balinese wedding, shot in Queensland
10. Sun Valley, 2026: the aunt at the wedding
11. Every Julia Roberts wedding at a glance
12. What her weddings tell you
13. Frequently asked questions

1. The Taos wedding: midnight on 4 July 2002

Julia Roberts married Danny Moder on her ranch outside Taos, New Mexico, at a midnight ceremony in the first hours of 4 July 2002.² Guests had been invited to what a Reuters report, reproduced by Dawn, described as an annual barbecue.³ The wedding was confirmed afterwards by her publicist, Marcy Engelman, in a statement that remains a model of the genre: "Julia Roberts and Daniel Moder married during a midnight ceremony before family and friends at their home in New Mexico." To which she added, "This is all we're going to release at this time."⁴

The details came out slowly, and mostly through People, which put the bride on its cover. CNN, reporting that week, put the guest list at about 50 to 60 close friends and relatives, none of whom had been told there would be a wedding, and placed the ceremony in a corner of the property beside a morada, the modest mud-brick chapel of New Mexico's Penitente brotherhoods⁵.⁶ The evening opened with fireworks, which on Independence Day would have raised no suspicion at all. Later accounts, including Entertainment Tonight's anniversary timeline, describe candles and paper lanterns appearing at midnight and the couple exchanging short handwritten vows inside a circle of rose petals.⁷

Roberts has said far more about the marriage since than she ever said about the wedding. In a 2018 conversation with Gwyneth Paltrow she called it "the best decision I ever made in my entire life." Asked on SiriusXM's Jess Cagle Show in 2022 for the secret, she offered "two bathroom sinks and lots of kissing," which is better advice than most wedding speeches manage.⁸

Midnight, it should be said, is not exotic to an Indian family. The muhurat for the pheras lands after midnight often enough that most of us have watched a bride's mother fight sleep beside the havan at two in the morning.

What you can take from it: the wedding inside the party. Roberts invited everyone to one event and held a smaller one within it. Shaadiwaale's guest list tool keeps a separate RSVP for each function, so the reception can be 400 and the pheras 40, and the WhatsApp invitation websites send each list out. For the ranch itself, the nearest Indian equivalent is a farmhouse with a lawn: start with lawns and farmhouses.

2. The Julia Roberts wedding dress: pale pink, not white

Roberts did not wear white. CNN, describing the People cover, reported "a pale pink dress with pearls and embroidered antique beads on it."⁵ The Spanish edition of Marie Claire, looking back, picked out its small embroidered details and square neckline.⁹

Pink was a nicely pointed choice for an actress whose most famous wedding until then had been one in which everything was pink. Thirteen years after Shelby's blush and bashful in Steel Magnolias (section 4), Roberts got married in the colour herself. Whether that was a private joke is not something she has said, and so not something we will say for her.

Indian brides have never needed persuading that a wedding outfit can be a colour other than white; the usual argument is over which red. White, for that matter, is a younger custom than most people think, as The Story of Weddings explains. Pale pink took longer here: it became bridal in December 2017, when Anushka Sharma wore it in Tuscany, a story we tell in Five Sabyasachi Brides. The more useful lesson is about light. A ceremony by candlelight is kind to pale colours and pearls, which glow where heavy zari would only glitter.

What you can take from it: dress for the hour of the ceremony, not the hour of the photographs. Browse wedding outfits by function, then shortlist bridal wear and jewellery designers who can work in a lighter palette.

3. The first wedding: Marion, Indiana, 1993

The first Julia Roberts wedding was even less of a production. On 27 June 1993 she married the country singer Lyle Lovett at St. James Lutheran Church in Marion, Indiana. According to WRTV in Indianapolis, the church was chosen because it was the church of one of the band's bus drivers, and her publicist said the whole thing was planned in two days. The minister gave the county clerk, Karen Weaver, the groom's name but not the bride's, and the couple asked her to sign the licence on a tour bus to keep the press away. "I saw him write down the word Julia Roberts," she told WRTV, "and so I said to the publicist, is this the Julia Roberts?"¹⁰

About 75 guests came. The Deseret News reported that the actor Barry Tubb walked Roberts down the aisle, and that Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins attended with their four-year-old son as ring bearer.¹¹ Lovett was in the middle of a national tour and played with his Large Band that same Sunday night in Noblesville, Indiana, where, WRTV reported, the bride introduced the band still in her wedding dress.¹⁰ The reception, in other words, was a concert with a paying audience. The marriage ended in divorce 21 months later.⁴

The wedding arranged in a week is a very Indian genre too, usually because a muhurat, a posting or a visa will not wait.

What you can take from it: if two days is all you have, have a list. The Shaadiwaale checklist works backwards from the date, whether that is a year away or this weekend, and if you would rather skip the ceremony altogether, our court marriage guide explains the steps and the timelines. If you would like the band to play the reception, and possibly the bride to introduce them, DJs and bands is where to start.

4. Steel Magnolias (1989): blush, bashful and an armadillo

The wedding that made Roberts famous was not hers. In Steel Magnolias, released in 1989, she played Shelby, the diabetic daughter whose wedding opens the film, and the role won her a Golden Globe for best supporting actress and her first Academy Award nomination.¹² Adapted from Robert Harling's 1987 play about his own mother and sister, it was shot almost entirely in his hometown of Natchitoches, Louisiana, with the wedding scenes at the Cook-Taylor House, as the Louisiana encyclopaedia 64 Parishes records.¹³

Shelby's colours, famously, are blush and bashful, which is to say pink and pink. The groom's cake, a Southern tradition in which the groom gets a cake of his own, is a red velvet armadillo, and the film makes the most of what happens when it is cut.¹⁴ Natchitoches has never quite got over any of this. For the film's 30th anniversary in November 2019, the town held a Blush and Bashful weekend that opened with an armadillo groom's cake baking contest, judged in part by the baker of the original.¹⁵

The Indian cousin is the ghar ki shaadi, the wedding held at home, with the courtyard tented and the aunts in charge of the colour scheme. Steel Magnolias is a reminder that two words, agreed early, can run an entire wedding's decor.

What you can take from it: pick the colour story before you pick the decorator, then brief them in a sentence. Shaadiwaale lists decorators and caterers by city, and the stages gallery is a quick way to show them what blush and bashful means to you.

5. My Best Friend's Wedding (1997): the song at the lunch

My Best Friend's Wedding, directed by P. J. Hogan from a script by Ronald Bass and released on 20 June 1997, is a wedding film in which the heroine is trying to stop the wedding. Roberts plays Julianne Potter, a New York food critic who learns that her oldest friend, Michael, is marrying Kimmy, played by Cameron Diaz, in Chicago in four days, and sets out to break it up. It made $299.3 million worldwide and earned Roberts a Golden Globe nomination.¹⁶

The scene everyone remembers is the lunch. Jules's friend George, played by Rupert Everett, poses as her fiancé and, at lunch with the wedding party, starts singing "I Say a Little Prayer" until the whole restaurant joins in. At a cast reunion reported by BuzzFeed News, the director said the scene was not in the original script, and Everett said that when he was cast the part was "literally two lines in the script."¹⁷ The film ends with the wedding going ahead, Jules giving a speech as maid of honour, and Jules dancing with George. Asked by Andy Cohen in December 2023 whether Michael should have chosen Jules or Kimmy, Roberts said: "Well, I mean of course, Jules. But he married Kimmy!"¹⁸

Indian cousin: the sangeet. A song that was not in the script, started by a guest with two lines, which the whole room ends up singing, is a fair description of every good sangeet we have been to.

What you can take from it: leave one slot in the running order unplanned. Our sangeet running order shows where it fits, and choreographers on Shaadiwaale can rehearse everything around it.

6. Runaway Bride (1999): the bride who did not know her eggs

Runaway Bride, released on 30 July 1999, reunited Roberts with Richard Gere and the director Garry Marshall nine years after Pretty Woman. She plays Maggie Carpenter, a woman in the small town of Hale, Maryland, who has run from three weddings and is planning a fourth. Gere is Ike Graham, a New York reporter who comes to write about her and notices that she takes on each fiancé's taste in everything, down to how she likes her eggs. She runs from the fourth wedding too. The film ends with the two of them marrying in a private hillside ceremony, without the big wedding that Maggie, it turns out, never wanted, and riding away on horseback. It was filmed largely in Berlin, Maryland, which stood in for Hale, and took $309.5 million worldwide¹⁹.²⁰

Indian cousin: the Kashi Yatra. In many South Indian weddings the runaway is the groom, and the escape is staged: he sets off, with umbrella and walking stick, to renounce the world for Kashi, until the bride's father intercepts him and offers his daughter instead. Every family knows how it ends, which is rather the point. And the horse at the end of Runaway Bride has an obvious Indian relation in the ghodi at the head of the baraat, though ours usually arrives rather than leaves.

What you can take from it: know your eggs before you book. Maggie's problem was agreeing to everyone else's wedding. Our questions before you book a venue are a good way to find out what you actually want, and if the Kashi Yatra is on your programme, kalyana mandapams are built for it.

7. Notting Hill (1999): a goat on the cake

Notting Hill, written by Richard Curtis, directed by Roger Michell and released in Britain on 21 May 1999, gave Roberts the strangest part of her career: a very famous American film actress, Anna Scott, which is to say more or less herself. It also gave her a wedding, though only in the closing minutes. After Anna announces at a press conference at the Savoy that she will stay in Britain "indefinitely," the film cuts to her wedding to William, played by Hugh Grant. The cake is topped with the violin-playing goat from La Mariée, the Chagall picture that has stood for the whole romance, and the last scene finds Anna pregnant in the private garden they visited on their first date. Roberts received a Golden Globe nomination for the part.²¹

It is the most economical wedding in her filmography and one of the more persuasive: two minutes, one cake and a detail only the couple understands.

What you can take from it: put one private joke where the guests will see it but not get it, on the cake, the mandap or the invitation. Brief it to your decorators, or hide it in the design of your WhatsApp invitation website.

8. Eat Pray Love (2010): an Indian wedding, filmed in Pataudi

Eat Pray Love, Ryan Murphy's adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir, released on 13 August 2010, sends Roberts's Liz from New York to Rome, an ashram in India and Bali.²² The India chapter was shot in September 2009 at the Ashram Hari Mandir Sanskrit Mahavidyalaya in Pataudi, "a longish ride" from Delhi, as The Himalayan Times put it. Reporting on the first day of a 20-day shoot, the paper described the ashram's Lakshmi Narayan Mandir as the principal set, with a yagyashala where five sadhus would perform a yagya on camera. Roberts, it added, had been rehearsing the 182 Sanskrit shlokas she was to chant.²³ The shoot overlapped with Navratri, and the BBC reported that police kept devotees out of the temple during filming, which did not go down well with the village.²⁴

In the film, Liz befriends Tulsi, a young devotee at the ashram who is facing an arranged marriage she has not chosen, and the India chapter closes on Tulsi's wedding. Reviewing the film in The Caravan in October 2010, Aseem Chhabra was unsparing about its India of crowds and beggar children, but noted Liz in a green sari, "remembering and regretting her own marriage."²⁵ It is the only Indian wedding in Roberts's filmography, and the film, to its credit, treats the bride's lack of choice as the sad part rather than the colourful part.

Off screen, Roberts told Elle that year, in an interview widely reported in August 2010, "I'm definitely a practicing Hindu," and said the family went to temple together to "chant and pray and celebrate."²⁶

What you can take from it: if you are planning near where it was filmed, Pataudi lies beyond Gurugram, and the Delhi NCR lawns and farmhouses listing is the place to start.

9. Ticket to Paradise (2022): a Balinese wedding, shot in Queensland

Twenty-three years after Runaway Bride, Roberts came back to the wedding film as the mother of the bride. In Ol Parker's Ticket to Paradise, she and George Clooney play Georgia and David Cotton, long divorced, whose daughter Lily goes to Bali after graduating, is rescued by a young seaweed farmer named Gede when her tour boat leaves her behind, and a month later announces that she is marrying him and giving up the law. Her parents call a truce for the sole purpose of sabotage, and steal the couple's blessed rings. The ceremony, when it comes, follows Balinese custom. Just before the couple pierce a pandan-leaf mat with a dagger, Gede stops to ask his future in-laws to give their blessing again, and this time to mean it. They do.

Bali, in the event, was played by Queensland. The film was shot between November 2021 and February 2022 in the Whitsunday Islands, at Tangalooma on Moreton Island, at Palm Bay Resort on Long Island and around Brisbane and the Gold Coast. It took about $168 million worldwide.²⁷

Indian cousin: the aashirwad. Every Indian wedding has a moment, usually several, when the elders are asked to bless the couple and the whole room watches their faces to see whether they mean it. Ticket to Paradise builds its entire plot towards that look. For ten more customs from abroad, each with its Indian cousin, read 10 unexpected wedding traditions from around the world.

What you can take from it: a destination wedding is a wedding first and a destination second, and the place in the photographs is not always the place in the contract. Our guide to what a wedding really costs in 2026 is the place to start the sums. If the destination is abroad, our guide to a wedding in Greece covers the legal routes, the visas and the costs in rupees, and for a beach without a visa there are Goa beach resorts and Kochi beach resorts.

10. Sun Valley, 2026: the aunt at the wedding

The most recent Roberts family wedding was not hers either. On Saturday 25 July 2026, her niece, the actress Emma Roberts, married the actor Cody John at an outdoor ceremony on his family's estate in Sun Valley, Idaho. HELLO!, citing photographs published by Page Six, reported that the ceremony was attended by close family and friends, including Julia Roberts with Danny Moder and their three children.²⁸

It makes a pleasing coda. Thirty-seven years after Shelby, the cinema's favourite bride turned up in the role every Indian family understands best: the aunt.

Indian cousin: the bua or the mausi, whose job description at an Indian wedding runs longer than the bride's: the rituals only she remembers, the seating only she understands, and the envelope.

What you can take from it: if you are the aunt this season, the Shagun Registry is the tidy way to give, and if you are the couple, the guest list tool will keep track of which side every aunt is on. For a famous wedding closer to home, read how Virat and Anushka's marriage made them bigger, not smaller, and for famous guests, the Bollywood co-stars who showed up at each other's weddings.

11. Every Julia Roberts wedding at a glance

Nine weddings in 37 years, three of them real: two as the bride and one as the aunt.

12. What her weddings tell you

Put the nine side by side and the films turn out to have been arguing her side all along. The big wedding in My Best Friend's Wedding goes ahead, and the heroine loses. Maggie Carpenter finally marries on a hillside with nobody watching. Anna Scott's wedding lasts two minutes and is remembered for a goat. The Balinese wedding in Ticket to Paradise only works once two parents stop performing their blessing and actually give it. And the two weddings Roberts chose for herself were small, quick and private: a borrowed Lutheran church with a tour bus outside, and her own ranch at midnight, with the guests let in on the secret only when the candles were lit.

The lesson for an Indian wedding is not to go small. Ours are large by design, and the crowd is half the point; nobody has ever been thanked for leaving the mausi off the list. The lesson is to protect a small room inside the large one: the pheras with the forty people who will cry, the vidaai without the photographers' ladders, the hour that belongs to the couple and not to the event. That is a planning problem, and it is the one Shaadiwaale was built for. The venue search has every type in this piece, from farmhouses to beach resorts, with prices in the open. The planning tools keep the budget, the guest list and the checklist in one place, function by function. And if you would like a second opinion on any of it, ask our team; it is free.

If you managed to keep your guests in the dark until midnight, we would very much like to hear how. We cannot promise you two bathroom sinks, but we can find you the venue.

Frequently asked questions

When and where did Julia Roberts get married?

Julia Roberts married Danny Moder at a midnight ceremony in the first hours of 4 July 2002, at her ranch outside Taos, New Mexico. About 50 to 60 family members and friends attended, according to CNN; they had been invited to a Fourth of July party and were not told a wedding was planned. Her publicist, Marcy Engelman, confirmed only that the couple "married during a midnight ceremony before family and friends at their home in New Mexico." It was Roberts's second marriage. Her first, to Lyle Lovett, was in Marion, Indiana, in June 1993.

What did Julia Roberts wear at her wedding?

At her 2002 wedding to Danny Moder, Julia Roberts wore pale pink rather than white. CNN, describing the People magazine cover that showed the bride, reported "a pale pink dress with pearls and embroidered antique beads on it," and later accounts mention small embroidered details and a square neckline. Her publicist declined to describe the outfit at the time, so the details come from the People cover and the coverage that followed it. The ceremony was lit by candles and lanterns at midnight, which suited the palette.

Who is Julia Roberts's husband?

Julia Roberts's husband is Daniel "Danny" Moder, a cameraman and cinematographer she met on the set of The Mexican. They married on 4 July 2002 at her ranch near Taos, New Mexico, and have three children: twins Hazel and Phinnaeus, born in November 2004, and Henry, born in June 2007. Roberts has spoken warmly about the marriage on the record, telling Gwyneth Paltrow in 2018 that marrying Moder was "the best decision I ever made in my entire life." The couple reached 24 years of marriage in July 2026.

Was Julia Roberts married before Danny Moder?

Yes. Julia Roberts married the country singer Lyle Lovett on 27 June 1993 at St. James Lutheran Church in Marion, Indiana. The wedding was planned in two days, about 75 guests attended, and the marriage licence was signed on Lovett's tour bus to keep the press away. That night Roberts introduced his band on stage in Noblesville, Indiana, still in her wedding dress. They divorced 21 months later. Two years before that wedding, in 1991, Roberts had called off a planned wedding to Kiefer Sutherland shortly before the date.

Which Julia Roberts movies have weddings in them?

The main ones are Steel Magnolias (1989), in which she plays the bride, Shelby; My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), in which she is the maid of honour trying to stop the wedding; Runaway Bride (1999), as a bride who keeps running; Notting Hill (1999), which ends with her character's wedding; Eat Pray Love (2010), which includes an Indian wedding at an ashram; and Ticket to Paradise (2022), in which she plays the mother of a bride marrying in Bali.

Is Julia Roberts Hindu?

Julia Roberts told Elle magazine in 2010, in an interview widely reported that August, "I'm definitely a practicing Hindu," adding that her family went to temple together to "chant and pray and celebrate." The same reports note that she grew up with a Catholic mother and a Baptist father. The interview came out the same month as Eat Pray Love, whose India scenes she had filmed in September 2009 at the Ashram Hari Mandir in Pataudi, Haryana.

Where was Eat Pray Love filmed in India?

The India chapter of Eat Pray Love was filmed in September 2009 at the Ashram Hari Mandir Sanskrit Mahavidyalaya in Pataudi, Haryana, a drive from Delhi. The Himalayan Times reported a 20-day shoot, with the ashram's Lakshmi Narayan Mandir as the main set and further scenes at the yagyashala and the guest quarters. Filming overlapped with Navratri, and the BBC reported that devotees were kept out of the temple while the cameras rolled. The production also filmed in Delhi.

Where was Ticket to Paradise filmed, if not in Bali?

Although Ticket to Paradise is set in Bali, it was filmed in Queensland, Australia, between November 2021 and February 2022. Locations included the Whitsunday Islands, Tangalooma Island Resort on Moreton Island, Palm Bay Resort on Long Island, Hamilton Island Airport, Brisbane and the Gold Coast. The film's wedding follows Balinese custom, including a ritual in which the couple pierce a pandan-leaf mat with a dagger. It opened in the United States on 21 October 2022.