David Nilsen and Tham

David Nilsen and Tham are partners who meet on a film set and marry in a celebration shaped by both their relationship and their families. Their wedding gives public form to a bond that Tham’s sister describes as bringing her another best friend, while the festivities leave David and Poppy with a vivid sense of the occasion’s emotional weight.

Meeting and Partnership

David says he and Tham met on set, where Tham was working as a director. Poppy reacts with surprise at this glimpse of David’s connection to the film world; David, in turn, jokes that he has become an insufferable Los Angeles person. The brief exchange establishes a concrete beginning for their relationship and shows David speaking about Tham with easy familiarity.

Poppy also hears that she and Tham are considered an especially good match. David agrees, calling Tham the fanciest. The remark accompanies the wedding weekend’s conspicuous settings: the couple’s guests gather at a midcentury mansion with a Googie-style roof, and the rehearsal dinner takes place at a candlelit bistro in which Tham had invested during its early days. These details make Tham’s taste and professional life part of the atmosphere around the marriage, without displacing the more personal ties on display.

Family Bonds and the Wedding

Tham’s sister’s toast supplies the fullest account of how the marriage fits into his family life. She recalls their childhood in northern California, including fierce arguments and the time Tham took her car without permission and crashed it into a telephone pole. Their bond changed in adulthood: after her first divorce, Tham asked her to move in with him. One evening, she found him crying at the film Sweet Home Alabama. After teasing him, she joined him on the couch; they watched the rest together, laughed and cried, and went out for ice cream in the middle of the night.

The sister explains that when she married again, she feared she might never live with Tham again. When he began talking about David, she could see how smitten he was and worried that the relationship would mean losing still more of her brother. Meeting David changed that expectation. She recognized him as another best friend, and her toast frames the marriage as an expansion of affection rather than a severing of family closeness. She acknowledges that no marriage is perfect, but expresses confidence in what the two men build together.

The ceremony takes place at a Spanish-style house with wrought-iron gates and a lush garden. Palm trees, columns, long dark wooden tables, and vivid yellow sunflowers and daisies shape the setting; a string quartet plays as guests arrive. The ceremony is brief, and David and Tham walk back down the aisle to an upbeat string arrangement of Here Comes the Sun, ready, in David’s phrasing, to celebrate.

Celebration and Significance

The wedding’s ending turns the guests into a visible community around the couple. A tunnel of people holding sparklers sends David and Tham into the night amid warm light and the affection of their friends and family. The celebration is not only a formal union: it gathers the relationships that have helped make the day meaningful, especially the sibling bond Tham’s sister describes and the friendship she finds in David.

For Poppy, the wedding is also charged by the difference between the couple’s certainty and her own unspoken future with Alex. As the day passes, she experiences the night as though two versions of it are running together; afterward, she and Alex leave quietly and hold one another through the night. David and Tham’s wedding thus stands as a joyful commitment in its own right and as the occasion against which Poppy registers the intensity and uncertainty of her relationship with Alex.