Inside Sophia Bush and Grant Hughes’s Tulsa Wedding
Actor and producer Sophia Bush met entrepreneur and real estate investor Grant Hughes on a New Year’s trip to Nicaragua almost 10 years ago. “We became fast friends but only saw each other a few times a year because both of us were traveling all of the time for work,” Sophia says. But at the start of the pandemic, the two began sharing books, articles, and philanthropic initiatives. That segued into long FaceTime sessions and, eventually, dating.
They got engaged in August of 2021 on Lake Como in Italy. “Grant booked us a sightseeing tour on a classic Riva boat and popped the question during golden hour,” Sophia remembers. “We shared the news publicly a few days later because we’d been spotted in Puglia by a group of very sweet Gen Z girls, and I watched them clock the ring on my finger. Their eyes went wide, they gasped, they looked at each other and back at me, and I knew that if we didn’t tell the world, someone else would tell the world for us.” Back at the hotel, she drafted a quick caption for an Instagram post.
Much to their surprise, their engagement story was picked up by media outlets around the world. “Happiness is apparently big news,” Sophia reflects. “And while it was lovely to be met with so much unabashed positivity—as a political activist I am all too familiar with the tendency of the internet to be abusive to women—it was also jarring. I play other people on TV for a reason.” But then she realized: If this personal news could travel so far, so fast, imagine what a wedding might do.
“When I thought about that spotlight, my activist brain turned on,” Sophia says. “Global attention is a hell of a platform, and as someone who doesn’t love attention but does love collective activism, I knew that this could be an incredible moment to spin the privilege of attention. And so I looked at Grant and said, ‘Honey. I think we should get married in Tulsa.’ He blinked. ‘Oklahoma?’ he asked. ‘Yup. Imagine what we could do if we turned our wedding into an event to showcase Tulsa: the Greenwood leaders we work with. The cultural renaissance happening there. Tech. Philanthropy. Civil rights justice. The art. The leadership. We could focus all of this attention and turn the spotlight on them.’”
Grant is from Oklahoma originally, and the couple spent much of their time in Tulsa over the pandemic. “Tulsa is a place where so much progressive justice work is happening, so much deep history has been uncovered and is at long last being honored, and so many people are building a deeply inspiring future,” Sophia says. “When thinking about the purpose of our wedding, we wanted our community that pours into us to pour into a community at large that we love and that deserves all our attention.”
Sophia and Grant enlisted Alison Events to help pull it all together. Ruth Skidmore led the team and worked alongside Bows and Arrows Flowers to execute the couple’s vision for a full weekend of events.
“It all began with welcome drinks at Lowood restaurant on Thursday night to ensure that our guests could become intimately acquainted with Tulsa and her history,” Sophia says. “On Friday, we worked with Tiffany Crutcher of the Terence Crutcher Foundation, community leader Brentom Todd, Nehemiah D. Frank of The Black Wall Street Times, and the Greenwood Cultural Center to facilitate tours of historic Greenwood. These included the entire Crutcher Foundation team speaking to the group, Dr. Crutcher leading the audience in prayer, and a walking tour through Reconciliation Park and the Greenwood Rising Museum. We then rented out Lefty’s on Greenwood for a post-tour regroup and took friends to meet Venita Cooper of Silhouette Sneakers to show some love to her business as well as Trey Taxton’s 19&21.”
Friday night, the couple wanted to host guests for a night-before evening of dinner and music so that everyone would feel like they knew each other and could really celebrate together on Saturday. For this, they gathered at Westhope, a historic Frank Lloyd Wright home in Tulsa.
