This Actor Couple’s Florida Wedding Was Filled With Sunset-Color Flowers and the Sounds of a Junkanoo Band
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While we’re all currently social-distancing and committed to mask wearing, this wedding took place in the months before the coronavirus pandemic began. We hope it will bring some joy to your reading list.
Denée Benton and Carl Lundstedt were in the same graduating class at Carnegie Mellon University, where they both studied acting. “It was a very small program, so you get to know each other very quickly and well,” Carl says. Since then, Denée has been nominated for a Tony for her portrayal of Natasha in Natasha, Pierre The Great Comet of 1812, appeared in the Lifetime series Unreal, and played Eliza Hamilton on Broadway; Carl was in Joker and the TV shows Cloak Dagger and Manifest.
They had been dating for five-and-a-half years when, on a very regular Friday, Carl proposed. Denée, coming home from a voice lesson, was focused on getting home to chill out before performing later that night. “I was getting over a serious cold and a little hangry at the moment, looking extra busted, might I add,” she jokes. “I get a phone call from Carl saying that he ‘lost his wallet’ on a run, and he tricked me into meeting him at the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park to help him look for it.”
After she arrived to help, Carl told her “security had found it at the Cloisters,” so under the guise of taking them to the lost and found, a curator escorted them on a tour through the museum. “At this point, I’m a little confused as to why we’re getting such special treatment just to look for a lost wallet,” Denée says. “We arrived at this gorgeous light-filled room and the curator left to ‘get the wallet,’ and as I turned to find a seat, I hear ‘Denée, you’re the love of my life,’ and I see Carl getting down on one knee. I thought he was joking, so I kept walking to my seat and then was struck by the reality that this was real and turned to him shocked saying, ‘Wait, now…? This is happening now?’ and all I’m thinking is, ‘My hands are ashy and I have on a headwrap!’ and then I heard, ‘Will you marry me?’ and then I short-circuited because I’m a control freak and wasn’t expecting it. Eventually, I woke up and said yes immediately and started crying once I caught my breath and realized the dream was coming true. The joke’s on me because my one requirement for our proposal was that he surprise me—even though I’m a controlling Capricorn and don’t really love surprises. He succeeded, and it’s one of the reasons I’m so happy we’re married, because spontaneity comes so naturally to him that our balance makes it beautiful.”
That night, Denée called out of her show. Carl had booked a room at The Beekman, a charming hotel in downtown Manhattan, so they could celebrate. “We had the best night reminiscing about how six years earlier, a little drunk in the streets of Pittsburgh before we were even dating, I scream blurted ‘I’m gonna marry you someday’ at him,” Denée remembers. “And the rest is history!”
Denée grew up in a big family in Central Florida, and it was very important to her that her elderly family members be able to attend the wedding. Getting married outside was also a top priority. “We wanted to find a beautiful outdoor venue, but because Florida is the South, we wanted to make sure that the venue had never been the location of a slave plantation, which was harder to find than we thought. Bella Collina ended up being the perfect venue for so many reasons, not only because of its beautiful outdoor Tuscan aesthetic and its ability to easily accommodate our 250 guests, but my parents grew up in the Jim Crow south of Central Florida and spent time as kids working and picking oranges on the land surrounding Bella Collina to help support their hardworking families,” Denée explains. “So for Carl and I as an interracial couple, it was so profound to have our parents be able to throw us the wedding of our dreams on the land as a very powerful full-circle ancestral moment for all of us.”
They worked with Amy Shack Egan, the founder of Modern Rebel, to plan everything. “I truly could not say enough praise for her and her incredible company,” Denée says. “They are so much more than wedding planners in an industry that can feel so shallow and obsessed with the binary. It was important for us to find a planner that led with similar values as Carl and I do. Inclusivity, individuality, and diversity are so much more than hashtags for their company; it is how they approached every conversation, vendor, and detail with us—to how we even wanted to arrange our ceremony chairs. It all came back to our original intentions of community, unity, and color and twinkly lights. They executed a love party that was beyond our wildest dreams.”
