Secret celebrity weddings from Zendaya and Tom Holland to Scarlett Johansson, George Clooney, Beyonce & Jay Z

“You missed it!”

We all missed it.

Celebrity stylist Law Roach, best known for his sartorial collaborations with Zendaya, was asked a fairly innocuous question on the red carpet of the Screen Actors Guild Awards earlier this month. How were the wedding looks coming along for his famous client?

“The wedding has already happened,” he said.

One of the most anticipated celebrity nuptials, that of Tom Holland and Zendaya, had taken place and we, the voracious public, didn’t get to be a part of it. Good for them.

It takes a lot of hush-hush planning and non-disclosure agreements to pull off a secret celebrity wedding, especially in the age of smartphone cameras and ubiquitous social media.

You don’t know if someone on the catering team, a distant third cousin once removed or the champagne supplier is going to send a tip-off email into Deuxmoi. The fact no one knew, and that, to date, no photos of the day have made its way online, is something of a small miracle.

Whether Roach let slip accidentally, or if it was part of a well-orchestrated publicity campaign, credit where credit is due.

Zendaya then followed up this week with an appearance at the Louis Vuitton show at Paris Fashion Week, wearing an almost all-white ensemble and a very important accessory — a simple gold band on her ring finger.

Neither she nor Holland have confirmed or commented, but the two have never spoken that extensively about each other in public after meeting in 2016 on the set of the first Spider-Man movie in which he plays Peter Parker and she MJ.

When they were engaged, there was no formal announcement or Instagram post. She debuted her diamond sparkler on the red carpet at the Golden Globes, and then a “family source” spilled some details to TMZ, followed by Holland’s dad who posted the tea to his own Patreon page.

Now the couple’s most ardent fans are trying to piece together a timeline of when the wedding might have happened in between their various filming commitments, especially for her, who in 2025, shot Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Dune Part 3 and Euphoria season three.

Zendaya also has coming up in three weeks, a movie with Robert Pattinson called The Drama, about a young couple in the lead-up to … dun dun dun … their wedding day. So, who knows, there’s a four per cent chance that this is all some very clever marketing stunt for the film.

But then again, Roach had warned last year that Zendaya had wanted to be a “secret bride”.

There are more than a few people of the opinion that celebrities don’t have a right to privacy because they, most of them, chose a life in the spotlight. But it would be unkind to suggest that just because they do a job — and enjoy the benefits — with a public profile, doesn’t mean they’re not allowed to keep things back for themselves.

If Zendaya and Holland have actually married in secret, they’re not the first ones to pull it off.

Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem did it in 2010, marrying in a small ceremony at a friend’s home in the Bahamas. Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost did too, but they did it during the pandemic, when the world had a few other things going on.

Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons also chose the island route, tying the knot in Jamaica in 2022, years after they were engaged and popped out two kids.

Just last week, the streaming series Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessett dropped its sixth episode, which dramatised the super-secret 1996 wedding of the Camelot heir and the Calvin Klein publicist.

Before their deaths in a 1999 plane crash, the golden couple were stalked everywhere by media in New York, and they caught everyone off guard by marrying in a very small ceremony on an obscure island, Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia.

They exchanged vows at a tiny church that had no air conditioning and no interior lighting in the presence of 40 guests. She wore a custom gown by her friend Narciso Rodriguez.

For a man who had been publicly scrutinised his entire life, and his bride, a private citizen who never grew comfortable with her profile, it was a triumph. They only ever released one photograph from the day, as they walked out of the church, hand-in-hand.

Later, Letitia Baldridge, a former chief of staff to Jackie Kennedy told People that JFK Jr and Bessett had planned the wedding themselves, and worked with “the skill of James Bond and the whole CIA” to keep it under wraps.

Two of the most famous people in the world, Beyonce and Jay-Z kept it all under wraps in 2008 by throwing the wedding inside their Manhattan apartment with a limited guest list of 40 people including Gwyneth Paltrow and Kelly Rowlands.

Apparently, paparazzi were camped outside, but not because of the wedding but just because they almost always were, but somehow missed the delivery of 70,000 white orchids that had been flown in from Thailand.

The couple drip-fed details of their wedding years later, such as debuting a glimpse of her wedding dress in 2011, in a video.

Perhaps it’s the contrast between their private wedding to the public spectacle of Jay-Z’s then-friend Kanye West’s nuptials to Kim Kardashian, that saw Beyonce and Jay-Z decline an invitation to the latter.

The 2014 Kardashian-West wedding (they finalised their divorce in 2022) was extravagant, and that’s an understatement.

They had a guest list of 200 people, who were flown between the rehearsal dinner at the Palace of Versailles to Italy by a fleet of private jets, Kardashian wore a Givenchy gown that cost $US500,000, the cake was taller than two metres, and everything was documented for her E! reality TV series Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

It was a wedding designed for the cameras, and the couple had struck a deal with People magazine for $US1 million for wedding coverage, after pocketing $US300,000 for the engagement news.

Magazine deals are — or were — a big part of the celebrity wedding industrial complex. OK! magazine reportedly paid $US3 million for Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s photos, while Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas, Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon and Eva Longoria and Tony Parker all collected $US2 million each. The Beckhams made £1 million from theirs.

For some celebrities, if it’s going to come out anyway, a mag deal helps to offset the cost of the expensive day. It’s a way to control how it’s going to be framed and covered.

But even the best-laid plans can be thwarted. Margot Robbie and Tom Ackerley went to some trouble to keep their nuptials under wraps, including, reportedly, withholding the location from their guests who were told to meet at different points between Byron Bay and the Gold Coast to be picked up by buses.

Paparazzi photos still emerged from the day, snapped from afar, and were published the following day.

Celebrity weddings can mean big money for the likes of photographers clamouring to get the picture that will sell to tabloid media and magazines, and they’ve deployed tactics including drones, helicopters and sliding money into the right hands.

Then it’s a game of one-up-manship for the famous couple to counter those tactics. Zeta-Jones and Douglas apparently had wedding invitations that were embossed with a hologram, which every guest had to hand over at the door for entrance, lest any gatecrashers get any ideas.

For others, like Kardashian and West, privacy is antithetical to the celebration, as it was for Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, whose multi-day nuptials triggered so much consternation in Venice last year.

The event, which seems like too small a word for something that included decoy/spare venues, a foam party on a yacht and party favours such as hand-blown Murano glass, was estimated by Forbes to have cost $US25 million.

One guest who wasn’t down with all the attention? Leonardo DiCaprio, who pulled his cap down so low on his face, it was surprising he didn’t walk straight into a canal.

Venice was also the location of choice for George Clooney and Amal Alamuddin, but their celebrations didn’t provoke protests, partly because by then, Clooney had been a regular fixture in the city thanks to his frequent visits for the film festival and he lived four hours up to the road in Lake Como for some years.

Also, they’re just so much more glamorous than Bezos and Sanchez, and a human rights lawyer doesn’t have the stink of tech baron villainy.

Whether Zendaya and Holland married in a small English village or beachside in California, it’s like we’ll never get the full details. But that’s OK. Because the only thing better than getting the full skinny on a celebrity wedding, is to applaud a couple who managed to do it without notice.