Naomi Watts posted a wedding photo on Instagram on Tuesday, June 9, captioning the image, "Happy Anniversary my love ♥️," to mark three years since she and Billy Crudup were married in a New York City courthouse in June 2023.
In the photograph Watts leaned her head on Crudup’s shoulder as he sat beside her on a wooden bench. She wore a white lace Oscar de la Renta dress; he wore a navy blue suit. The post drew congratulatory comments from friends and fellow celebrities including Sharon Stone, Niecy Nash-Betts and Andy Cohen, and Watts reshared additional wedding photos with Crudup to her Instagram Stories.
The post is a public punctuation mark on a relationship that began years earlier: Watts and Crudup first ran into each other on Broadway in 2009 and a source confirmed they were dating in 2017. They made their first red carpet appearance together at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in February 2022, and Watts confirmed their marriage with an Instagram post in June 2023 that read, "Hitched! 🕊️🪢♥️."
Watts has spoken before about keeping the 2023 courthouse ceremony deliberately small. On Live with Kelly and Mark in January 2024 she said, "nothing was planned because we wanted to keep it low-key," adding, "I even got my flowers from the bodega at the corner. I wrapped them in old ribbon. I keep my ribbons for a good reason. Pulled them out of the drawer, made it myself." She described the ceremony as quick and improvised, with a few friends joining whoever was in town.
The timeline of events is compact but slightly unusual: the couple’s first legal marriage took place at a Manhattan courthouse in June 2023, and the pair later held a second ceremony in Mexico in June 2024 — an arrangement Watts has not publicly fully explained. Her brother, photographer Ben Watts, announced the Mexico nuptials in an Instagram post last year.
The friction in the story is straightforward: Watts chose to mark three years of marriage on the anniversary of the initial courthouse wedding, even though the couple staged a separate celebration in Mexico the following year. The Instagram post on June 9 tied the couple’s public anniversary to that first, low-key legal moment rather than to the later celebratory ceremony.
That choice aligns with how Watts described finding Crudup and the value she places on arriving at partnership later in life. On Live with Kelly and Mark she said, "It's never too late, right? We found each other later than… yeah, late in life. And it's really a special thing." The June 9 post reaffirmed that sentiment in public form: a simple photograph and a brief, personal caption.
What remains unresolved is why the couple chose to hold a second ceremony in Mexico in 2024 after the courthouse wedding the year before. Watts has given detailed, candid color about the first ceremony’s spontaneity and smallness, but has not explained what prompted the additional event abroad. No future public appearances or celebrations tied to the anniversary have been announced.
For now, Watts’s decision to commemorate the June 2023 courthouse date answers how she prefers to mark the marriage’s timeline: by the moment they made it official. The Mexico ceremony remains a distinct, but separate, chapter whose motives the couple has left mostly to themselves.
