Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck eventually tied the knot after calling off what would have been their first wedding, but their Las Vegas ceremony was very different from the one they planned during their first engagement.
The Oscar winner and the “Get Right” singer were originally set to tie the knot in September 2003 after a whirlwind romance that began on the set of the movie Gigli. The wedding was poised to be a massive affair, with hundreds of guests and a veil of secrecy so thick that even attendees didn’t find out where it was happening until days before the ceremony.
When the duo called off the event, they hinted that they’d lost control of what should have been a romantic day. “Due to the excessive media attention surrounding our wedding, we have decided to postpone the date,” they said in a joint statement at the time. “When we found ourselves seriously contemplating hiring three separate ‘decoy brides’ at three different locations, we realized that something was awry.”
In 2022, Affleck admitted that the couple’s first attempt at marriage was overshadowed by the excitement surrounding their relationship — and their collaboration on Gigli. “It became a story in and of itself,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “The funny name, the Jennifer Lopez romance and overexposure of that, it was kind of a perfect storm.”
Nineteen years later, their actual wedding was far simpler than the bash they’d planned the first time around. Instead of having an audience of hundreds, they tied the knot in a small Las Vegas wedding chapel — and didn’t even spring for an Elvis Presley impersonator.
Lopez hinted that her twins, Max and Emme, were present for the ceremony, but it wasn’t immediately clear whether any of their other family members witnessed the event. The Grammy nominee shares the twins with ex-husband Marc Anthony. Affleck, for his part, shares Violet, Seraphina and Samuel with ex-wife Jennifer Garner.
After Lopez and Affleck exchanged vows in Vegas, they held a second ceremony in Georgia the following month with friends and family. Two years later, however, the fairy tale was over. Lopez filed for divorce on the second anniversary of the pair’s Georgia wedding and cited April 26, 2024, as the date of separation.
Keep scrolling for a breakdown of how Affleck and Lopez’s Vegas wedding compared to the one they would have had in 2003:
