From red carpet to white wedding... in one night

WHEN GAME OF THRONES actor Sophie Turner, 23, and her fiancé, US singer Joe Jonas, 29, walked the red carpet at the Billboard Music Awards last week, few could have guessed what was in store. Unlike most guests, who left the ceremony at the Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas and headed to after-parties or bed, the couple had different plans. They made a beeline for the iconic Little White Wedding Chapel for a surprise wedding.

The service, part of a package costing just $600, was officiated by an Elvis Presley impersonator, and featured the exchanging of edible candy rings. Only a handful of friends and family were there, but Sophie did call her mother Sally in the UK hours before, after applying for a marriage licence earlier in the day. ‘She said, “Mum, I’m getting married in Vegas,”’ her mum has said of the surprise event. ‘I am absolutely delighted and so is my husband Andrew.’

After the ceremony, the happy couple posed with a pink Cadillac and jumped – fully clothed – into a Jacuzzi. The Chapel itself has an unrivalled reputation in the city. It featured in Bradley Cooper comedy The Hangover and was the venue for Britney Spears’ wedding to childhood friend Jason Alexander in 2004. The lively ceremony, however, is thought to be only the warm-up to a bigger event later this year. The pair had been planning a wedding in France in the summer – with Joe confirming the destination to the Zach Sang Show last month. A source close to the couple tells Grazia that this more formal celebration is very much still on the cards, with the Las Vegas event just a preview of what is to come – and an attempt to play down their big day.

‘Sophie and Joe wanted to take the pressure off by doing something totally spontaneous and fun,’ the insider added. ‘They couldn’t wait to be man and wife and want the next destination wedding to be a celebration rather than a nerve-ridden formality. They’re both the opposite of traditional, too, so the style suited them. Sophie’s attitude was, “Why wait?” and Joe loves how knee-jerk and fun-loving his new wife is.’

The couple met when Joe contacted Sophie online in 2016, sliding into her DMS on Instagram. He proposed in 2017, with Sophie crediting him for changing the way she saw herself. ‘When someone tells you they love you every day, it makes you really think about why that is and I think it makes you love yourself a bit more,’ she told podcast Phil In The Blanks. Last week, Joe applauded his fiancée for speaking so frankly about her battles with depression. ‘I am proud of her,’ he told Extra. ‘I think the best thing about it is she can encourage other young people out there and be a voice that they can listen to.’

The relationship, along with her acclaimed performance as Sansa in eight series of Game Of Thrones, catapulted Sophie from her simple English background (she grew up near Leamington Spa, where she says she and her siblings ‘used to muck around in the mud’) into Hollywood royalty.

The marriage also makes official ‘The J Sisters’ – a nickname Sophie has given to her relationship with her new sister-in-law, actress Priyanka Chopra, who married Joe’s brother Nick last year. Theirs was a lavish Indian wedding, which Priyanka herself admitted was over the top, with a series of elaborate ceremonies over three days – at a reported cost of $500,000. ‘People will need vacations after this wedding,’ she told Vogue.

According to Sophie, her Parisian wedding won’t follow suit. ‘We’re trying to keep it as low-key as possible, so it’s more of an intimate thing,’ she told Harper’s Bazaar earlier this year, when asked about plans for her own wedding.

Still, we can expect a full attendance from Sophie’s fellow Game Of Thrones

cast members: Maisie Williams, who plays Sophie’s sister Arya, will even be maid-of-honour. Who’s going to tell her she missed wedding number one?