“Lu, how did we get engaged?” Lena Dunham calls her three-day husband in Somerset, England, on the other side of the room, where they are spending a short honeymoon after their wedding in London last Saturday night. “Lu”, also known as the Peruvian-British musician Luis Felber, who appears as Attawalpa, interrupts his dinner preparation – a vegetarian pasta with ginger, garlic, onions and chopped pumpkin, served with a salad of tiny green plums and fennel in Agave dressing – to weigh up. “Well, you were not doing well and I asked to see you at the hospital and I stayed longer than I should have stayed. And I just thought it made me feel weird to see that you weren’t okay. And then when you came back the next day we were in bed and I said, ‘I just want you never to go through this alone again.’ And you said, ‘Oh, I want to marry you one day.’ And I said, ‘Why don’t we do this sometime, soon? The next day I went for a walk with my friend Tom and he was talking about his life and I thought, ‘I think I proposed to Lena last night.’ And when I got home, we made it come true. “
“He’s doing the engagement story better than me,” says Dunham, and her joy can be felt on a transatlantic phone call. After Dunham and Felber met in January through a “series of machinations of friends” who the 35-year-old actor, writer and filmmaker considered wore three custom-made dresses by Christopher Kane. “I tried to analyze it and we kind of talked about it, but we got around it,” says Dunham of Felber’s suggestion, noting that some people have been doing just that for 10 years. “So we just reduced the 10 years to 10 hours. And then it took us a month to get married instead of waiting six months or a year. “
Dunham and Felber, both in the midst of their own creative projects (Dunham is editing a film for which Felber is writing the music), accepted that planning and hosting a wedding in just a month during a pandemic would not be possible without his challenges . So they called in reinforcements. “There was no way I could do it without help, and it was my mother who suggested reaching out to her gallery owner Amanda Wilkinson’s child, Donna,” says Dunham. The event coordinators Donna Marcus Duke and her partner Jacob Mallinson Bird had never celebrated a wedding before, but were up to the challenge, which was great, not least because of the travel restrictions of Covid. “Poor Jacob and Donna had such bumpy invitations because people kept falling out,” says Dunham, adding that some people on their already shortened guest lists were unable to attend because they contracted the virus. “Hearing from a wedding guest that they can’t make it because they have Covid is a great reminder that this is still the case and to take all precautionary measures seriously.” And that was very important to Dunham and Felber: All guests had to do two lateral flow tests and submit proof of vaccination. “I have a weak immune system, so I take the Covid restrictions very seriously,” explains Dunham, “but it is important to both of us. Lu wants to protect me and he wants live music to come back, and he just thinks about human safety in general! ”At the venue, which was set up so that there was enough space between the guests and between the ceremony, reception and dance , masks were also provided.
All in all, Dunham estimates that about 60 people gathered at the members-only club to watch the couple take the vows they wrote themselves under a makeshift chuppah designed by florist Gail Smith . “One of the first influences we showed Donna was those colored, baby blue bodega roses, and she said, ‘But what if you didn’t have to dye your flowers?'” Says Dunham. (“We knew immediately this was going to be a wedding without a single white rose,” Duke jokes.) “They introduced us to Gail, who uses all the local English flowers, but because she knew we were obsessed with bright batik, almost overcolored, flowers, she managed to be in both worlds and completely blew us away. ”The chuppah, a traditional Jewish wedding altar, was one of the few spiritual gestures that Dunham, whose mother is Jewish, and Felber, whose father is Jewish, wanted to include. Through Duke, who studied theology at Oxford, they met their minister, Dr. Harrie Cedar, who helped them keep traditional elements with modern accents. “I loved her from the moment I saw her,” says Felber of Cedar, a queer woman who has traditional elements like circling the bride and groom three times, drinking from the same wine goblet and breaking a glass as a sign of Celebration coordinated end of the ceremony. “Lu did some really amazing Spanish accent Hebrew that had all the space in engravings,” Dunham says of the ceremony, which was viewed in person and on Zoom and broadcast to many of her friends and family in New York and Los Angeles, and to Felber’s family in Peru.
But Dunham and Felber, who wore a bespoke blue suede suit designed by Emily Bode, were visibly delighted with the personal commitment. “As for the bridal shower, if we include siblings, we were nine. You can have a much bigger wedding with fewer bridesmaids, but I think it just speaks to how excited I was to have my close friends there, ”Dunham said of her bridesmaids, who were Taylor Swift; Actor Myha’la Herrold; Rosa Mercuriadis; Tommy Dorfmann; her cousin Jenna Hally Rubenstein; Felber’s sister Alma-Kori Felber; and Dunham’s podcasting partner Alissa Bennett, who flew in for the weekend and brought Dunham her “something borrowed” in the form of her son Ollie’s Lego soldier. “I spent so much time talking to my friends about our feelings about FaceTime during the pandemic, but I haven’t seen some of my best friends in over a year,” says Dunham. “And you know, my friends have had a lot of unfortunate things to do with me in adulthood.
