True bliss!
True Blood stars Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer wed Saturday evening at a private residence in Malibu, Calif., UsMagazine.com has confirmed. Guests — many of them bearing gifts in purple boxes and with purple bows — included Elijah Wood and True Blood costar Carrie Preston with husband Michael Emerson (Lost). Paquin, 28, and Moyer, 40, exchanged their vows beneath a tent across the street from the beach.
The couple announced their engagement last August. Connecting over daily breakfasts at a West Hollywood cafe, they began dating a few months after filming first began in 2008 for HBO’s smash vampire series, now in its third season. On the show, Paquin (a 1994 Oscar-winner at age 11 for her role in The Piano) plays Sookie Stackhouse, the psychic, mortal lover to vampire Bill Compton (Moyer); their first kiss occurred onscreen.
But the duo waited until February 2009 to debut their real-life romance — a delay that was “very intentional on both our parts,” British actor Moyer explained at the time. “It was very important to me that the cast and crew we were working with didn’t feel it was fickle….We didn’t want to take anything away from the show.”
Moyer proposed to Canadian-born, New Zealand-raised Paquin on a Hawaiian beach, presenting her with a ring — a rustic diamond set in an antiqued platinum inset — he helped design with jeweler Kathy Waterman. Why Hawaii? “There was a song in the first season, ‘White Sandy Beach in Hawaii,’ which was kind of funny and ironic,” he told Access Hollywood last year. “[It] all started out as a joke and then we decided to go to Hawaii with my kids,” says the actor, who has a son, Billy, and daughter, Lilac, from two previous relationships.
These days, Moyer splits his time between his native London and the Venice, Calif. home he shares with Paquin.
“With Anna it’s just about pure trust, on camera and off,” Moyer gushed in the July issue of Playboy. “I have never trusted anybody like I trust Anna.”
“I feel so lucky right now,” Paquin says in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. “Life is pretty great.”