Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds along with his wife and actor Blake Lively, have apologized recently for holding their 2012 wedding ceremony at a plantation featuring nine slave cabins, referred to as ‘Slave Street’.
Reynolds said they were "deeply and unreservedly sorry” adding that “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 Fast Company, in a profile published Tuesday quoted Reynolds as saying.
The duo tied the knot in Boone Hall Plantation in Mount Pleasant. The move was criticised at the time, but came under renewed scrutiny in 2018 after Reynolds tweeted in support for ‘Black Panther’ – the first superhero film to feature a majority Black cast – after which he was accused of hypocrisy.
The wedding industry has also been responding to plantation weddings' role in glamorizing sites of violence against Black people, according to NBC News. Last year, Pinterest and The Knot banned pictures of all plantation weddings on its platform, including Reynolds' and Lively's.
"Weddings should be a symbol of love and unity. Plantations represent none of those things," a spokesperson for Pinterest said at the time, per The Washington Post. "We are working to limit the distribution of this content and accounts across our platform, and continue to not accept advertisements for them."
Reynolds and Lively appeared to express regret over their wedding earlier this year, but this is the first time they've explicitly apologized for it.
"We're ashamed that in the past we've allowed ourselves to be uninformed about how deeply rooted systemic racism is," the couple wrote on Instagram. The also announced a $200,000 donation to the NAACP legal defense fund in May, following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers.
"We want to educate ourselves about other people's experiences and talk to our kids about everything, all of it ... especially our own complicity,” they confessed.
During his profile interview, Reynolds also revealed that he and Lively, parents to three daughters, exchanged vows in a separate ceremony after their wedding.
Reynolds recently announced he's launching the Group Effort Initiative, a programme focused on providing training to Black people and other underrepresented groups to support them as they pursue careers in the film industry.
The Gossip Girl diva on the other hand had also been criticised earlier for creating a lifestyle website called Preserve in 2014 that celebrated the Antebellum South — the period before the Civil War when slavery was still allowed — that featured a photoshoot titled "The Allure of Antebellum" without acknowledging the atrocities that took place during the period.
"The term 'Southern Belle' came to fruition during the Antebellum period (prior to the Civil War), acknowledging women with an inherent social distinction who set the standards for style and appearance," said the website, according to Vox. "These women epitomized Southern hospitality with a cultivation of beauty and grace."
Lively has not commented on the Antebellum spread, but acknowledged that the website fell short in a 2015 interview with Vogue about her decision to end Preserve.
COMMENTS
Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive.
For more information, please see our Comments FAQ