INSTAGRAM/Natasha Hall
So Happy Together: DAYS’s Leo Howard and his bride, Natasha Hall, who temporarily played Sloan.
On September 9, 2024, Days of our Lives’s Leo Howard (Tate) and Natasha Hall — the actress who briefly subbed for Jessica Serfaty as Sloan Petersen — tied the knot four-and-a-half years after their first date. And the couple’s intimate and unconventional wedding may just rival the romance factor of anything you’ve seen play out on daytime.
“We had a very small wedding up in Big Sur,” recounts Howard. “We rented a beautiful house for five days with our closest friends and family. Natasha and I went and eloped in the morning in the woods. It was just her and I. We did the whole ceremony, the two of us. Then we came back to a nice dinner with everyone. It was really special.”
Saying “I Do”
The couple decided to ditch a more elaborate ceremony in a traditional venue for one main reason. “For us, the wedding with a big ceremony and a lot of people lost the meaning of what it is, which to us is just a commitment to each other,” Howard explains. “That’s what I wanted. That’s what both of us wanted. We took our vows very seriously, what we were promising each other, and we just wanted to have an intimate moment with just the two of us.”
The unconventional ceremony, which was totally legal, was performed by Howard and Hall. “You just need a witness,” explains Howard. “They don’t have to do anything, they just have to be there to witness it. Then you all sign the papers.” And in Howard and Hall’s case, they needed to look no further for a witness than the photographer they hired to document the nuptials.
Howard and Hall initially met via a mutual friend. “I had done a movie with this guy, and he invited me over to a barbecue,” recalls the actor. “Natasha was friends with him, and she was there. Over the years I’d heard him talk about what a special woman she was, and so meeting her was really cool. It was very clear that I was attracted to her and vice versa. So I asked her out on a date, and now, about four-and-a-half years later, we’re married.”
As their relationship grew stronger, Howard decided to pop the question. “I proposed on a hike up in Topanga,” he says. “Actually, it was on a hike that we first said, ‘I love you.’ I surprised her at the top of the mountain [with the marriage proposal]. I just popped the question. It was really fun. It’s been a cool journey together.”
So far, married life has been everything the pair could have hoped for, albeit not very different from when they were dating. “It’s pretty much exactly the same,” asserts Howard. “We have a pretty healthy, stable relationship, and so we are always pretty content, which is great. We’re not… I wouldn’t even say we’re in a honeymoon phase. It just feels exactly the same as it was before. The last couple years, we’ve really operated as a unit anyway.”
As for how Howard would describe that unit, he notes that he and his bride are both “a little unconventional in a lot of ways and I like that. A lot of people tend to want to make the other person everything. They tend to enmesh their lives. We’re very specific about keeping separate lives and being fulfilled outside the relationship, so that we can kind of bring something to it. She’s not responsible for making me happy at all whatsoever. I think that some people get in trouble, when they put that pressure on their partner.”
While the pair are intent on enjoying separate aspects of their identities, they’re also totally committed to their life together. “We have a lot in common. We have the same sort of values in life,” says Howard. “But we’re very different in a lot of ways, too. Natasha is pretty introverted, and I’m pretty extroverted. I think that works well. Things that are my weakness, she is really good at and vice versa. Like I’m super-distractible. I struggle to sit down and research things, because my brain is working a million miles a minute. She is a methodical researcher. She’ll research everything and know everything about it [after] 20 minutes. But the same time, she’s not the best talker when it comes to being out and about. I can talk to a stranger on the street and get to know everything about their lives in 10 minutes. She can’t do that. So there’s a bit of a difference between us, but we do complement each other quite nicely.”
#DAYS #Exclusive #Leo #Howards #Tate #RealLife #Love #Story #Unconventional #Wedding
