Marvel superhero movie star Ryan Reynolds is offering apologies for holding his wedding to actress Blake Lively at a South Carolina plantation.
Reynolds married Lively at Boone Hall and Gardens in 2012. The plantation is one of America’s oldest working plantations, has continually raised crops for more than 320 years, and is on the National Register of Historic Places. But now, the Deadpool star is profusely apologizing for having held his wedding at a facility that once employed hundreds of slaves.
During an interview with Fast Company, Reynolds says having his wedding at Boone Hall is something “we’ll always be deeply and unreservedly sorry for.”
The six-year lag time between the wedding and Reynolds’ sudden realization that his “privilege” made his choice of wedding venues problematic occurred because the wedding event didn’t become a point of contention until 2018. It was then that a tweet Reynolds posted praising the black-centric superhero movie Black Panther caused a backlash from activists who used his wedding as a means to taunt him for his purported privilege and racism.
“It’s impossible to reconcile,” Reynolds said of his plantation wedding venue. “What we saw at the time was a wedding venue on Pinterest. What we saw after was a place built upon devastating tragedy.” Reynolds insisted that such a mistake can “cause you to shut down, or it can re-frame things and move you into action.”
Making amends this year, Reynolds and his wife donated $200,000 to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. And that is on top of the $2 million the celebrity pair donated last year to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights.
“We want to educate ourselves about other people’s experiences and talk to our kids about everything, all of it . . . especially our own complicity,” Reynolds and Lively recently told fans.
Reynolds hasn’t been too quick to sign onto every last liberal trend, though. In March the actor ridiculed liberal Hollywood for flocking to social media to burnish their woke bona fides by telling fans how much they care about the coronavirus outbreak. Reynolds posted a coronavirus video to Twitter skewering celebrities who were using the crisis as a platform for self-aggrandizement.
“I think in times of crisis, I think we all know that it’s the celebrities we count on most. They’re the ones that are going to get us through this,” the Hitman’s Bodyguard actor joked in his inimitable deadpan style.
“Right after healthcare workers, of course,” Reynolds added. “First responders. People who work in essential services. Ping-pong players. Mannequins — they’re great. Childhood imaginary friends, sure. Like 400 other types of people.”
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