AFTER almost eight years of marriage, Ryan Reynolds has revealed it was “a big f**king mistake” to have had his wedding with wife Blake Lively at former slave plantation in South Carolina.
The ceremony took place at Boone Hall Plantation in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina on September 9, 2012.
While speaking with Fast Company, the 43-year-old actor, who met Blake in 2010 on the set of Green Lantern, called it a “giant f***ing mistake” to have their nuptials there.
Ryan added: “It’s something we’ll always be deeply and unreservedly sorry for.
”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 famous couple, who share three daughters, “got married again” at their home a few years later, but Ryan still feels “shame” about their first one.
After realizing what a mistake it all was, he decided to not let it shut him down but instead let it “reframe things and move [him] into action.”
The Aviation Gin owner continued: ”It doesn’t mean you won’t f*** up again. But repatterning and challenging lifelong social conditioning is a job that doesn’t end.”
Moving into action, as he said he wanted to do, Ryan and Blake gave a $200,000 donation to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund earlier this year and opened up about wanting to “educate” themselves further.
The Deadpool star and Gossip Girl alum wrote in a statement on Instagram: ”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.
”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.”
The pair continued: ”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.”
Ryan’s latest efforts include launching a program aimed at improving diversity and inclusion in the entertainment industry.
The Group Effort will bring on “between 10 and 20 trainees who are Black, Indigenous, people of color or people from marginalized and excluded communities, of all ages,” to learn and grow within the world of Hollywood.
Ryan wrote on the website: “These new recruits will be paid and housed out of my salary and will spend their days on set learning from professionals and getting real-life experience that they can then parlay into another job and another job and hopefully a career in the film industry.”
