Ryan Reynolds has apologized for getting married on a a former slave plantation in South Carolina in 2012. Reynolds and his wife Blake Lively have faced widespread criticism for picking Boone Hall as their wedding venue, but Reynolds is now expressing deep regret about that choice.
"It's something we'll always be deeply and unreservedly sorry for," the 43-year-old actor told Fast Company in a recent interview. "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."
The "Deadpool" star explained that he and Lively later "got married again" at home but were plagued by shame.
"A giant f---ing mistake like that can either cause you to shut down or it can reframe things and move you into action," he said. "It doesn’t mean you won’t f--- up again. But repatterning and challenging lifelong social conditioning is a job that doesn’t end."
Last year the couple donated a combined amount of $2 million to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. They also posted a message to Instagram expressing their shame of being ignorant of systemic racism.
"We're ashamed that in the past, we've allowed ourselves to be uninformed about how deeply rooted systemic racism is," they wrote. "We want to educate ourselves about other people's experiences and talk to our kids about everything, all of it … especially our own complicity. We talk about our bias, blindness and our own mistakes. We look back and see so many mistakes which have led us to deeply examine who we are and who we want to become. They've led us to huge avenues of education."
The couple added: "We're 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. It's the least we can do to honor not just George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and Eric Garner, but all the Black men and women who have been killed when a camera wasn't rolling."
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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