Ever since Julia Roberts wandered into Hugh Grant’s ramshackle travel bookshop, Britons have been fooling Americans into thinking we are a country of highly cultured and unusually attractive people. Unfortunately, years of Prince Andrew honking about trade and Peter Mandelson parading around in his underpants have dented this once fearsome reputation – so thank heavens for Dua Lipa and Callum Turner.
At a time when foreign headlines about Britain seem to focus on political chaos, economic stagnation and Londoners getting their watches stolen, Lipa, 30, and Turner, 36, are fast becoming the country’s most important ambassadors. After all, they embody everything Americans prize highly. They are wildly successful, fantastically good-looking, and – despite the fact that many people would like to sleep with one, if not both of them – utterly devoted to each other.
The London-based couple, who got married on Sunday at Old Marylebone Town Hall ahead of a three-day wedding celebration in Italy later this week, met in a way that befits their new “national treasure, but sexy” status.
Dua Lipa and Callum Turner tied the knot in an intimate ceremony at Old Marylebone Town Hall – Dua Lipa/Instagram
The pair were briefly introduced at The River Café in early 2023 before meeting again at a Los Angeles restaurant a year later, when she was having dinner with the poet Mustafa (of course, she was). Lipa immediately remembered Turner was the “really hot guy from The River Café”.
Turner later elaborated on the story, saying: “We sat next to each other and realised we were reading the same book.” The novel in question was the Pulitzer Prize-winning Trust by Hernan Diaz, which looks at power and truth through the eyes of a married couple in 1920s New York. Turner told Lipa he had just finished the first chapter. She replied that she had too, and his response was: “So we’re on the same page.”
I mean, come on. If you were watching that scene in a rom-com, you’d think the writer had overdosed on Nancy Meyers and needed to spend some time in the real world. Not that this bookishness was a fluke – both stars are, in fact, very well-read (one photograph shows them, yes, lounging on a private jet, but rather than sipping champagne Kardashian-style, she is holding Miranda July’s All Fours, and he is halfway through Percival Everett’s The Trees).
As well as being a mega-famous singer and songwriter who sells out auditoriums around the world, Lipa, in particular, has been credited with making reading cool again for the TikTok generation. Earlier this month, she gave the introductory speech at the International Booker Prize awards ceremony, and her book club, Service 95, has been hugely popular, despite being launched not in a fashionable London literary café, but in a women’s prison.
On top of all this, Lipa is leaving literary interviewers quaking in their boots after gaining a reputation for outdoing the entire Hay-on-Wye set. Writer Blake Lefray said he was “pretty blown away” by Lipa’s interviewing style, describing her as “the best one doing it right now. She asks smart questions dipped in empathy and curiosity”.
And while Turner – who is known for his starring roles in series like The Capture and Masters of the Air, and who has even been tipped as the next James Bond – may not possess Lipa’s highly public literary credentials, he does seem to belong to a group of British actors whose appeal lies partly in the cerebral. This is lucky, considering Lipa was once photographed in a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Good grammar is sexy”.
Turner has spoken about his love of visiting museums and art galleries, and prepares for roles in the most literary way possible. Before playing Major Egan in Masters of the Air, for example, he pored over hundreds of diaries from men who fought in the Second World War and even gave a public reading of a 1945 love letter from an Eighth Air Force veteran.
Turner and Lipa also straddle multiple sides of Britain’s complex class system, in that they both grew up in plush, cultured parts of London without coming from particularly affluent families. Turner, in particular, has spoken about his childhood in Chelsea on the World’s End council estate, where he met artists, musicians, designers and writers. Just this week, milliner Stephen Jones, who designed Lipa’s Bianca Jagger-inspired civil wedding hat, wrote on Instagram that working with the couple had been a pleasure, as he has known Turner since he was a baby.
The designer of Lipa’s Bianca Jagger-inspired civil wedding hat (pictured), says the couple were a pleasure to work with – Dua Lipa/Instagram
“I had this very working-class upbringing on an estate and also this colourful world that I was able to dive into of famous or interesting people. It inspires you – it showed me that there was something else,” Turner has said of his childhood. Like a good Londoner, he also waxes lyrical about the capital – he loves walking along the Thames, going to Stamford Bridge to support Chelsea and popping south of the river to the Canton Arms in Stockwell for a Whisky Mac. He’s also devoted to his dog, Golo (“a half lab-half rott”), and the two of them are often seen getting around London on foot.
Somewhat similarly, Lipa was brought up in West Hampstead until she was 11, when she moved back to her parents’ birth country of Albania for four years before returning to north London to attend the prestigious all-girls comprehensive, Parliament Hill School. “I understood the duality of my heritage from an early age,” she has said. “I was really proud of it, but when I was younger, I wished my name was, say, Hannah.”
After being raised in West Hampstead until she was 11, Lipa moved back to Albania for four years – Dua Lipa/Instagram
Lipa’s parents fled Kosovo during the Yugoslav conflict and had to rebuild their lives in London from scratch, and this complex background probably left the singer both more ambitious and more grounded than your average London music kid. Even today, her childhood is arguably what differentiates her from other stars competing in the same playing field.
Taylor Swift’s celebrity tends to operate almost like a monarchy, complete with factions and diplomatic incidents, while by comparison, Lipa’s world feels refreshingly low-drama. Yes, she and Turner enjoy the trappings of fame – their first red carpet appearance together was, of course, at the Met Gala – but she doesn’t get involved in political spats like Billie Eilish or in starry feuds like Charli XCX and Swift.
Turner and Lipa made their official red carpet debut at the 2025 Met Gala – John Shearer/WireImage
In this era when being famous often seems deeply unenviable – so many mental health crises and deep-plane facelifts – Turner and Lipa’s lives also appear almost suspiciously pleasant. Their Instagram posts would be annoying if they weren’t so wholesome – reading novels on Amalfi beaches and in Copenhagen wine bars; grinning in delight as herds of elephants pass their jeep in South Africa; standing under church frescoes in Palermo, Sicily; and showing off the roast potatoes they cooked for dinners at home with school friends rather than fellow stars.
Mostly, in a world of showmances, 72-day marriages and Tom Hiddleston declaring his love on a T-shirt, the pair seem genuinely devoted to each other. A video shot in Paris appears to capture them unaware they are being watched, kissing, chatting, smoking and dancing by the Champ de Mars. A day after their wedding on Sunday they were pictured blissfully strolling through Primrose Hill in north London.
Lipa has said that discovering they were reading the same book at the same time has felt “a thousand per cent fate”, and Turner has called her “the most beautiful woman in the world”. Rather than talk about “growth” or “journeys” like so many celebrities, he has simply stated that all he wants is for them to be together forever.
Really, could this beleaguered country have asked for anything better to get us out of our rut? Forget King Charles and his jokes about the Boston Tea Party, what Keir Starmer really needs to do to get international diplomacy going is ask Lipa and Turner to jet off to Washington, snog in the rose garden with a novel in each of their back pockets, and tell the assorted guests exactly why they should be investing in talented, sexy and extremely well-read Britain.