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Celebrity

05th Aug 2020

“Deeply and unreservedly sorry:” Ryan Reynolds apologises for marrying on former slave plantation

Jade Hayden

“It’s impossible to reconcile…”

Ryan Reynolds has apologised for choosing a former slave plantation as his wedding venue.

The Deadpool actor and Blake Lively married in Boone Hall, a former slave plantation in South Carolina, in 2012.

Speaking to business magazine Fast Company, Reynolds said that he and Lively will “always be deeply and unreservedly sorry” for marrying in the venue.

“It’s impossible to reconcile,” he said. “What we saw at the time was a wedding venue on Pinterest. What we saw after was a place built upon devastating tragedy.

“Years ago we got married again at home – but shame works in weird ways. A giant f*cking mistake like that can either cause you to shut down or it can reframe things and move you into action.

“It doesn’t mean you won’t f*ck up again. But re-patterning and challenging lifelong social conditioning is a job that doesn’t end.”

This comes after Reynolds and Lively donated $200,000 to the NAACP following the death of George Floyd and the series of Black Lives Matter protests that followed.

The couple said that they wanted to “educate ourselves about other people’s experiences and talk to our kids about everything, all of it.”

“We’ve never had to worry about preparing our kids for different rules of law or what might happen if we’re pulled over in the car,” they said in a statement.

“We don’t know what it’s like to experience that life day in and day out. We can’t imagine feeling that kind of fear and anger. We’re ashamed that in the past we’ve allowed ourselves to be uninformed about how deeply rooted systemic racism is.

“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.”