Vikings and Hunger Games actor-turned-country singer Alexander Ludwig has married his fiancée Lauren Dear, according to Instagram photos posted on January 3rd. The marriage announcement comes less than two months after they shared their engagement news in November. The singer explained that the two decided to elope, and they did so with a mountain background at Utah’s The Lodge at Blue Sky, Auberge Resorts.
“My wife, my best friend, the future mother of my children, my everything,” he prefaced the first post, which shows a photo of the couple on their wedding day.
“We decided to elope,” he continued in the caption. “It has been such a crazy year but it certainly put things into perspective. Life is too short and I didn’t want to spend another day without calling this beautiful woman my wife.”
He shared that they will have a bigger celebration with their friends and family in the future, but for now he’s enjoying life with his now-wife, their dog, and a yurt “on a mountain top in the middle of nowhere.”
In a second post, Ludwig included more photos from the day. Fellow country singer Jason Aldean sent his well wishes to the couple in a comment on the second post, writing, “congrats brother! Looks amazing.”
Ludwig entered the country music world with his debut single, “Let Me Be Your Whiskey,” released in January 2020. The actor/singer, who played Cato in The Hunger Games and Bjorn Ironside in Vikings, told Sounds Like Nashville that he grew up listening to country music and always wanted to make his own.
“I spent a lot of time in the mountains and I grew up playing hockey, and it was just the thing we always listened to in the hockey dressing rooms,” said the Vancouver, Canada native.
“After Vikings, it was my first real breath I had where I could do it, and I never wanted to be that Hollywood guy who shows up and expects all of this stuff,” he continued. “That’s not how I wanted to go about it. I wanted to go to Nashville and learn what it takes to write a great song from the ground up.”
Ludwig started taking trips to Nashville to begin his musical journey, and when he met two of Jason Aldean’s band members, Tully Kennedy and Kurt Allison, they soon started working together.