It’s been a couple of weeks since Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce tied the knot at Madison Square Garden in New York. But more than a decade ago, Swift found herself at the center of a very different story, when she ruined a wedding, or so she thought at first. It involved comedian and actor Andrew Santino’s staged wedding, who recently revealed Swift’s reaction when she learned what had actually happened.

“Taylor Swift came over, and Bieber and her were listening to new music, and he said, ‘Hey, check out these fireworks.’ And we set fireworks off the deck of Malibu over the ocean,” Santino revealed. “And out on the ocean, we had a boat with a wedding on it. I was the groom. And one of the fireworks, we’ve strung a line to make it look like it hits. So, we made it look like it hit the boat and set it on fire, and we had to swim to shore, and I was the groom, and so she ruined my wedding.

“She bought every single second of it. There wasn’t a moment. She was one of the only ones where it was so; she was so deep in, and she thought she ruined a wedding. I mean, think about Taylor Swift and her brand ruining a wedding. We were like, ‘What’s the worst case scenario in her mind?’ And I was like, ‘You ruined my wedding, Taylor Swift, you ruined my whole life.”

But of course, it was a prank that Santino orchestrated successfully in 2012, during an episode of Punk’d. Justin Bieber hosted that episode. A couple of years ago, when Santino dropped by the New Heights podcast hosted by Travis and Jason Kelce, he revealed that Bieber had just returned from Japan with fireworks.

As a result, he invited Swift to come to his house to set off the fireworks from the back of his house. At the same time, however, that house was rented by Santino and his team in Malibu to pull off the prank. He organized a fake wedding on the boat in the ocean, while portraying the role of the groom. Bieber, meanwhile, was asked to pull off the prank. Still, there was a caveat.

“He (Bieber) was like, ‘I have these fireworks from Japan. Let’s set them off,'” Santino told the Kelce brothers in 2024. “And Taylor, obviously, to her credit, who’s always on point, was like, ‘I don’t know if I wanna do that.'”

That’s why Santino had a backup plan in place. He created a fake button so that, if Swift refused to set off the fireworks, she would unknowingly press it while Santino set the boat on fire himself. In the end, Santino lit the boat ablaze and swam back to shore, while Swift remained completely unaware. Meanwhile, the fake bride, who was in tears throughout the stunt, remarked, “Maybe this is a sign I shouldn’t marry him.”

Taylor, all worried, replied, “No, I don’t think that’s right.”

Santino, however, wasn’t done with the prank. He even jokingly asked Taylor Swift to buy him a new boat. In the end, though, it all turned out to be a harmless stunt that Swift unknowingly fell for.