Ever been to a wedding where the officiant states a vow between one husband-to-be to the other, proclaiming that “thou shalt not bite his head off when he gently rouses you from your slumber?”
The rom-com wedding officiant, Nico Raineau, explained that “in his defense: it’s 3 a.m., you’re still on the couch covered in cookie crumbs, and the dogs thought you were dead.”
Such narrations are par for the course for Raineau, founder of RomCom Weddings. Based in Los Angeles but providing services nationwide — as of 2027, he’ll be officiating in the New York tristate area and New England every July and August — Raineau brings nearly 20 years of experience as a screenwriter and film director to the craft of officiating weddings.
With a career spanning Universal Pictures, Netflix, and Hulu, in a post-COVID, post-writers’ strike landscape of studio mergers, Raineau found himself increasingly disenchanted with showbiz. “We’ve lost the soul of what makes cinema special,” he said.
Raineau began searching for a new venue for his talents, and his good friend threw him a lifeline in 2019 when she asked him to officiate her wedding. He soon realized he had a knack for it.
In the spring of 2022, Raineau officially launched RomCom Weddings and to date has officiated nearly 100 ceremonies, charging from $999 to $2,000-plus, depending on travel and ceremony specifics.
In the past four-plus years, Raineau, who is a certified professional officiant through the International Associate of Professional Wedding Officiants, has come to learn that being a ceremonialist isn’t dissimilar from being a filmmaker. Nearly everything he was pursuing in the film business he’s found in the wedding industry, but with far fewer barriers to entry and a lot less ego.
“I traded telling made-up love stories for sharing real-life rom-coms,” he said. “And I get to perform original stories in front of a live and interactive audience.”
His secret sauce for making a memorable ceremony? Through a series of pre-wedding interviews, he gets to know his clients individually, not just as a couple, learning their inside jokes and contrasting their separate versions of their love story, often quoting them back to one another during the ceremony.
The grunt work pays off as the question Raineau most commonly fields after ceremonies is how long he’s been friends with the newlyweds. (“I’m not, but I am now!” is his go-to reply.)
At the wedding of Grace Ferguson-Pell and Alex Waciega at Stone Acres Farm in Stonington, Conn, in July 2023, Raineau found himself officiating at the very place he and his wife tied the knot. “It was a full circle moment returning to Stone Acres six years later to marry an awesome couple,” he said.
He’s certainly had his fair share of wonky gigs, too. Last October, Raineau found himself officiating a wedding for a couple who own one of Los Angeles’ most popular family-run haunted house attractions. The duo, who have two adult children and have been together for over 30 years, spend months designing and building a haunted house in their front yard.
“Traditional (i.e. boring) ceremonies often focus on the clichés of love, but I find that audiences enjoy the messiness of love.”
Nico Raineau
“So, it didn’t take them long to decide on their wedding venue — they got married inside a [spooky] chapel they built,” said Raineau. “After scaring the bejesus out of strangers on Halloween night, we shut down the attraction at around 11 p.m. and gathered in the chapel, with everyone still in terrifying costumes and spooky music blasting in the background, and I performed their marriage ceremony,” introducing himself as the “minister of macabre.”
The jab that got the heartiest chuckle from the crowd? “After years of Halloween frights, this corpse-bride and groom-reaper have become so numb to horror that the only thing left to scare them is the living nightmare that is marriage.”
Even if you’re skipping the theatrics, Raineau recommends playing with the format, breaking free from tradition and making it your own. “Fill it with surprises for your guests,” he suggested.
Take the nuptials of clients Nicole Fischer and Sakibul Huq, who wed in June last year in Palos Verdes, Calif. Raineau learned that in the past, Huq would prank Nicky by pretending to propose to her, only to then present her with a dirty bottle cap off the floor. During the ceremony, when it came time for their rings, Raineau pretended to drop them, then presented him with a bottle cap instead of his wedding ring. “It was a marquee moment of the ceremony and something all their guests talked about the rest of the night,” recalled Raineau.
Per Raineau, what makes “meet-cute” entertaining comes down to the storyteller’s skill level. “Traditional (i.e. boring) ceremonies often focus on the clichés of love, but I find that audiences enjoy the messiness of love,” said Raineau.
For Raineau, he feels lucky to be the merry-maker and joyous one at the center of it all. “It’s literally a dream job,” he said.
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