Ryan Reynolds is apologizing for marrying Blake Lively on a plantation.
Reynolds, 43, and Lively, 32, exchanged vows in 2012 at Boone Hall Plantation in South Carolina, but they later regretted not giving the site's "devastating" history more thought, Reynolds told Fast Company in a new interview. The plantation features nine slave cabins.
"It’s something we’ll always be deeply and unreservedly sorry for," said the "Deadpool" star.
"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," he added.
The Canadian-born actor said the "shame" he and Lively later felt about the setting motivated them to educate themselves about racism.
"A giant f------ 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--- up again. But repatterning and challenging lifelong social conditioning is a job that doesn’t end," he said.
Reynolds and Lively — who share daughters James, 5, Inez, 3, and a child reportedly named Betty, whom they welcomed last year — donated $1 million to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights last year.
In late May, the couple announced they'd donated another $200,000 to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody days before. In a joint statement on Instagram, the pair said they were "ashamed" that they'd been uninformed in the past about the evils of systemic racism in the U.S., but vowed to continue educating themselves on the topic.
The couple wrote that they wanted to "use our privilege and platform to be an ally. And to play a part in easing pain for so many who feel as though this grand experiment is failing them."
Reynolds recently announced he was launching a new program called the Group Effort Initiative to hire trainees who are "Black, Indigenous, people of color or people from marginalized or excluded communities" to work on his next film.
"Making a movie, well, it's a group effort. But for entirely too long, that group has systemically excluded Black, Indigenous, people of color and a whole host of otherwise marginalized communities," Reynolds shared in a video on Instagram.
The actor said he was committed "to bringing between 10 and 20 trainees from the BIPOC community and any and all other marginalized communities of all ages" to the movie's set. (BIPOC is a term referring to Black people, Indigenous people and people of color. It has gained popularity during the recent rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.)
In his caption, Reynolds wrote that the Group Effort Initiative was "designed 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."