When actors Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds got married in 2012, they famously thought it was a good idea to hold their wedding at Boone Hall, a former slave plantation in South Carolina. And now, Reynolds has finally publicly apologized for the decision.
In a new interview with Fast Company, the Deadpool star admitted that he and his wife not only regret having the wedding at Boone Hall, but even decided to have a more recent wedding at home because of the "shame" that it has continued to bring them.
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"It's something we'll always be deeply and unreservedly sorry for," said Reynolds of the plantation wedding. "It's impossible to reconcile. What we saw at the time was a wedding venue on Pinterest. What we saw after was a place built upon devastating tragedy."
"A giant fucking mistake like that can either cause you to shut down or it can reframe things and move you into action," he continued. "It doesn’t mean you won’t fuck up again. But repatterning and challenging lifelong social conditioning is a job that doesn’t end.”
In an Instagram post in June, the couple wrote about their financial and practical work on anti-racism as a family, and announced their donation of $200,000 to the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund. "We’re ashamed that in the past, we’ve allowed ourselves to be uninformed about how deeply rooted systemic racism is," the couple wrote.
They also said that they hope to raise their three daughters "differently" than they were raised, and are "committed to raising our kids so they never grow up feeding this insane pattern and so they’ll do their best to never inflict pain on another being consciously or unconsciously."
Most recently, Reynolds announced the launch of The Group Effort Initiative, in which the actor pledges to bring 10-20 "trainees" from marginalized groups to get experience on set through movie he is planning to make this fall, "COVID-willing." In his tweet about the project, Reynolds wrote that the goal is to "invest in the talent and creativity of any and all under-represented communities who’ve felt this industry didn’t have room for their dreams."