The strangest part of Talulah Riley’s love story with Elon Musk wasn’t that they divorced.

It was that they married again.

And then divorced again.

Long before Musk became one of the most recognizable billionaires in the world, Riley was a young British actress who had never really experienced a serious relationship. Then one night in London, she met a shy man who talked to her about rockets.

Within days, everything moved at extraordinary speed.

Years later, after two marriages to the same man, two divorces, another unexpected relationship with an artist more than two decades her senior, and a romance few people saw coming, Riley’s personal life would take one more surprising turn.

She would walk down the aisle again.

This time, the man waiting for her was Thomas Brodie-Sangster — the actor millions still remembered as the lovestruck schoolboy from Love Actually.

For anyone who had followed Riley’s romantic history, it was difficult to imagine a more unexpected ending.

But the story had started almost two decades earlier, in a London nightclub.

Riley met Musk at Whisky Mist in 2008.

At the time, she was still in her early twenties. Musk was considerably older, already a father, already an entrepreneur, and already living the kind of life that seemed almost impossibly distant from hers.

Yet Riley’s first impression apparently had little to do with money, technology or status.

She remembered him as shy.

“He said, ‘May I put my hand on your knee?’” Riley later recalled in a BBC documentary.

She agreed.

What stayed with her was the fact that he had asked.

That small moment was followed by something much bigger.

Musk asked whether she would meet him for breakfast the following day.

She did.

At the end of breakfast, he asked her to stay for lunch.

Then came dinner.

What might ordinarily have unfolded over several weeks seemed to happen almost continuously.

And Musk had an unusual advantage in the art of courtship.

He could talk about rockets.

Riley was fascinated.

But when she told her father, Doug Milburn, about the remarkable man she had met, the romantic momentum suddenly hit a wall.

Milburn, formerly associated with the National Crime Squad and later a writer of television police dramas, did what protective fathers everywhere had learned to do in the internet age.

He searched the man’s name.

Elon.

Rockets.

Electric cars.

What he found alarmed him.

Musk had five children and had been married.

To Riley’s father, the situation looked obvious.

His daughter, young and inexperienced, had been swept up by a wealthy older man with a complicated personal life.

His reaction was immediate.

Riley later recalled him effectively warning her that she had been picked up by a playboy and telling her not to go to dinner with Musk.

For Riley, the accusation landed badly.

She believed herself to be a good judge of people.

The man she had actually met didn’t match the character her father believed he had discovered online.

So she checked.

A friend told her Musk had already separated from his then-wife, Justine, and that divorce proceedings were underway.

The situation was complicated.

But it was not quite what it had first appeared to be.

Riley continued seeing him.

And from there, the relationship accelerated at a pace that would have overwhelmed many couples.

They reportedly became engaged just ten days after meeting.

Not ten months.

Ten days.

Soon Riley was joining Musk and his children at his enormous Los Angeles home — a property measuring roughly 20,000 square feet.

It should have felt like entering another universe.

In some ways, it probably was.

Riley had gone from being a young actress with little serious romantic experience to helping navigate life with an entrepreneur, five children, an enormous house and businesses attempting things most people considered impossible.

Yet wealth didn’t make the relationship simple.

If anything, Riley would later describe circumstances that suggested the opposite.

The house might have been vast, but a giant home cannot create stability on its own.

And extraordinary professional ambition does not automatically leave room for an ordinary marriage.

Still, in 2010, Riley and Musk married.

From the outside, theirs looked like the kind of union newspapers are built for: the British actress and the eccentric technology billionaire.

But celebrity photographs rarely reveal what happens after everyone goes home.

Two years later, the marriage was over.

Riley and Musk divorced in 2012.

For most couples, that would have been the final chapter.

They had tried.

They had failed.

They would move on.

Except Riley and Musk did something almost nobody expected.

They moved back toward each other.

Musk himself later acknowledged the unusual emotional gravity between them. During one period of separation, he said they had spent months apart to see whether distance would change how they felt.

It did.

Just not in the way separation usually works.

Absence apparently did make the heart grow fonder.

Their first divorce had not killed the relationship.

In 2013, Talulah Riley married Elon Musk for the second time.

Same woman.

Same man.

A second wedding.

It sounded romantic enough to tempt anyone into believing the first divorce had merely been a mistake.

Perhaps they had needed perspective.

Perhaps losing the marriage had shown them how much it mattered.

Perhaps two people who lived unconventional lives simply required an unconventional route toward happiness.

Then the old instability returned.

In 2014, Musk filed for divorce.

Then he withdrew the filing.

Another reversal.

Another moment when an ending stopped being an ending.

For those outside the relationship, it became almost impossible to predict what would happen next.

But in 2016, this time Riley filed.

Their second divorce was finalized later that year.

They had now married twice.

And divorced twice.

There was no third wedding.

Whatever affection remained, the cycle had finally ended.

For Riley, it also meant something deeper.

Musk had not simply been an ex-husband.

By her own account, he had effectively been her first proper boyfriend.

Think about the emotional distance contained inside that sentence.

Your first serious relationship begins with breakfast in London.

Days later, you are engaged.

Then you enter a world of enormous wealth, children, technology companies and relentless ambition.

You marry.

You divorce.

You reconcile.

You marry the same person again.

One of you files for divorce.

The filing disappears.

Then, eventually, you file yourself.

And suddenly the person who defined your entire understanding of adult romantic relationships is no longer your husband.

Twice over.

It would have been easy for Riley’s romantic life to remain permanently attached to Musk’s name.

For years, headlines often introduced her through that association.

“Elon Musk’s ex-wife.”

Technically accurate.

But extraordinarily incomplete.

Because Riley did move on.

And the next man in her life was almost the opposite of what people might have predicted.

After Musk, Riley quietly became involved with British artist Matthew Rice.

Rice had previously been married for around three decades to ceramics designer Emma Bridgewater before their divorce in 2018.

He was also 23 years older than Riley.

Once again, her relationship attracted curiosity.

The age gap alone guaranteed that.

But unlike the enormous public fascination surrounding Musk, Riley and Rice’s relationship existed much more quietly.

There were fewer dramatic headlines.

Less spectacle.

For a woman whose most famous relationship had involved one of the world’s most intensely watched businessmen, that comparative privacy might have appeared to signal an entirely different chapter.

Then that relationship ended too.

And what happened next was the part almost nobody had predicted.

Because when Riley’s next romance became public, the man beside her wasn’t a billionaire entrepreneur.

He wasn’t an older artist.

He was an actor four years younger than she was.

And audiences had known his face since he was a child.

Thomas Brodie-Sangster became internationally recognizable playing Sam in the 2003 Christmas classic Love Actually, the little boy desperately trying to impress his school crush.

He later appeared in Nanny McPhee, Game of Thrones, The Maze Runner films and The Queen’s Gambit.

By adulthood, he had spent years doing something similar to Riley: growing up while audiences believed they already knew him.

Their paths eventually crossed professionally.

Riley and Brodie-Sangster worked together on the FX series Pistol, the drama about the rise of the Sex Pistols.

And somewhere between scripts, filming and the strange experience of playing other people for a living, the two actors began a relationship of their own.

When the romance became known, it surprised many people.

Riley’s relationship with Rice had ended without the kind of prolonged public transition celebrity watchers expect.

Then suddenly she and Brodie-Sangster were together.

But the bigger surprise was how naturally the relationship seemed to progress.

There was no remarrying an ex.

No highly publicized cycle of separation and reconciliation.

No billionaire spectacle surrounding them.

Just two actors who had already lived unusually public lives choosing each other.

In July 2023, Brodie-Sangster announced their engagement.

Riley was smiling beside him.

The photograph was simple.

The significance wasn’t.

The woman whose first serious relationship had raced from a nightclub conversation to an engagement within days was engaged again at 37.

This time, almost fifteen years had passed since she first met Musk.

She was no longer the young actress stepping into someone else’s extraordinary world.

She had already lived through the extraordinary world.

She had married twice.

Divorced twice.

Had another significant relationship.

Built her own career.

And learned, presumably, what she did and did not want.

Then came the final twist.

In June 2024, photographs emerged showing Riley and Brodie-Sangster marrying in England.

Riley wore a traditional white wedding dress and veil.

Brodie-Sangster wore a formal morning suit.

There were guests, flowers and the unmistakable atmosphere of an English summer wedding.

After everything that had come before, Talulah Riley was a bride again.

But this wedding carried a different weight.

Not because anyone outside a marriage can know whether one relationship is destined to last longer than another.

They cannot.

It mattered because of the journey that had preceded it.

Riley had once become engaged to Musk almost immediately after meeting him.

Their relationship had survived a divorce only to produce another marriage.

Then it survived a divorce filing only to eventually end with another divorce.

Her romantic history could easily have become a story about returning to the same person again and again.

Instead, years later, she chose somebody completely different.

And there was something almost cinematic about who that person turned out to be.

Thomas Brodie-Sangster had become famous playing a boy convinced that love was worth an outrageous leap of faith.

In Love Actually, little Sam ran through an airport for the girl he adored.

More than twenty years later, the actor who played him stood waiting at the end of an aisle for Talulah Riley.

Not a billionaire.

Not a whirlwind ten-day engagement.

Not another attempt to repair an old marriage.

A new chapter.

The irony was impossible to miss.

For years, Riley’s romantic life had been defined publicly by one famous surname: Musk.

But relationships are rarely understood properly from headlines.

A divorce can look like failure.

A reconciliation can look like destiny.

A second divorce can look like proof that the reconciliation was a mistake.

Then enough years pass, and the meaning changes again.

Sometimes the person who feels permanent at 23 becomes part of the story that teaches you what permanence actually requires.

Sometimes leaving someone does not immediately tell you where you belong.

And sometimes the relationship that surprises everybody else arrives only after you have stopped living according to everybody else’s expectations.

Talulah Riley’s love life has certainly been turbulent.

There were two weddings to the same man.

Two divorces.

A relationship with a man 23 years her senior.

Then an unexpected romance with the former child star from one of the most famous romantic films ever made.

But perhaps the most remarkable part isn’t how many times Riley’s story changed.

It’s that she kept allowing it to.

Because the end of one great love does not mean the end of your capacity for another — and sometimes the person waiting in your final chapter looks nothing like the person you once thought would be there forever.