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Can’t say we had this one on our 2023 bingo card, but actors Anika Noni Rose and Jason Dirden have gotten married. And it happened three months ago. While we figure out how these two kept their relationship so secret that they dated and got hitched with no one noticing, we also want to ponder how the Power universe figures in prominently here.
Tony Award winner Anika Noni Rose once played the lethal LaVerne “Jukebox” Ganner in season three and four of Power. She (spoiler) eventually met the bad end that she deserved as a ruthless dirty cop who happened to be Kanan’s cousin.
Dirden, who you may also know from American Soul, House of Payne and Greenleaf, plays Traymont Stinson on Power Book III: Raising Kanan. Wow, look what happens when Power universes collide!
Now, back to the wedding. The couple did not meet on any of the Power sets as their characters don’t overlap. They met, Rose told Brides, who first reported the news for their cover story on the couple, while doing the Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun in 2014. They became friendly, but nothing more serious manifested. Then they reconnected and things changed.
“Neither one of us really planned to end up with somebody in the business,” Rose, 50, told Brides. “We have fun. We laugh a lot, which is really, really important. And we don’t talk so much about the business.”
Dirden, 42, says that he loves his wife’s goofy side, which, if you remember her on Power or as the wealthy and troubled character on the Netflix series Maid, means she’s damn sure deserving of all the accolades she’s received for her acting work. Of course, she’s also the voice of Princess Tiana, Disney’s first Black princess.
“This woman is so silly. She has a 4-year-old child living inside of her that will never go away,” he told Brides. “She loves to prank people, and she has that kind of spontaneous silliness to her that allowed us both to release any type of armor or any type of defense mechanism, and allowed us to really just be who we are with each other.
We created this friendship walking 60 blocks from rehearsal to the gym, just talking about life, or about anything really. It had nothing to do with the play that we were working on. There’s always been that kind of comfort and ease between us.”
Sounds like grown folks love to us.
The proposal happened over Zoom in December 2021 when Rose joined his family’s annual holiday call wondering why all of her family had joined, too. It soon became clear what was happening after Dirden played a video of their moments together, set to Norah Jones’ “Come Away With Me” and then played a conversation he had with his father about love, commitment and proposing.
After that, he got down on a knee and asked Rose to marry him.
The two tied the knot in October of last year at Los Angeles’ Paramour Estate. The couple’s busy schedules left them little time to plan a wedding but with the help of a wedding planner, they made it happen in a ridiculously time-pressed two months.
Their announcement yesterday, had many of their surprised celebrity friends leaving congratulatory messages under the announcement post.
“If none of your business were a couple,” Bevy Smith commented, echoing, well, everyone. Fellow actors and more seemed just as surprised to hear the news as the public. The couple received well wishes from Lena Waithe, Mara Akil, Ava DuVernay, Kerry Washington, Loni Love, Jennifer Hudson, Christian Siriano, Jemele Hill, Deborah Joy Winans, Holly Robinson and more.
Euphoria star Colman Domingo was one of the few who knew because he officiated the wedding.
The couple will remain living in Los Angeles. Rose is starring in Showtime’s vampire drama Let the Right One In, and Dirden remains in Power Book III: Raising Kanan. Given their busy schedules, no announcement of honeymoon plans was made.
Even with all the things that they had to swap out, rethink and let go with their tight wedding deadline, Rose says she’s happy with how her wedding turned out.
“You’re not going to have everything you want,” she says. “And what you find is when you let go, sometimes you end up with what you wanted.”
Sounds like more than just wedding advice.
