Ryan Reynolds Calls His And Blake Lively’s Plantation Wedding A “Mistake”
Back at the beginning of June, many celebrities decided to lend their support to the Black Lives Matter movement and have some big, bold conversations about systemic racism. Like Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, who posted a five-part statement to social media, acknowledging how “uninformed” they were about racism, and that they had donated $200,000 to the NAACP to help mitigate their past “mistakes.” But they never specified what those mistakes were. Well what do you know, it would appear that one of the Lively-Reynolds’es finally got around to addressing the giant plantation in the room.
If there’s one thing that anyone knows about Blake and Ryan’s 2012 wedding, it’s that they chose to get married at Boone Hall Plantation in South Carolina. This was at the height of Blake’s antebellum obsession, as seen for a brief moment when her attempted lifestyle brand Preserve.us existed. Many people knew in 2012 that the romanticization of plantations was a bad look. But Blake and Ryan still went ahead and got married at Boone Hall Plantation. That questionable choice has followed them around ever since. I don’t know how it was decided who would get the thankless job of publicly apologizing for their wedding venue. I’m guessing Blake handed Ryan two mint sprigs from her julep cup and do declared that the loser would be whoever drew the shorter stem. And that’s possibly how Ryan came to addressing their plantation wedding during an interview with Fast Company.
Ryan explains that he and Blake will forever be sorry for choosing to get married at Boone Hall Plantation, which still actively hosts weddings, adding that they chose the venue after seeing a picture of it on Pinterest.
“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. Years ago we got married again at home – but shame works in weird ways. A giant fucking 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 fuck up again. But repatterning and challenging lifelong social conditioning is a job that doesn’t end.”
Um, the word “plantation” is literally right there in the name. But maybe the sign out front read Boone Hall Nice Place No Bad History House? Not likely. So with that being said, Ryan, please Preserve us the excuses (a joke generously donated by Mieka). But obviously Blake and Ryan realized they fucked up and felt guilty; why else would they have a do-over wedding in their own house a few years later? But is “mistake” even the right word here? And throwing Pinterest under the bus like that? Listen, there’s a lot of mistakes you can blame on Pinterest. But those mistakes are usually limited to the attempt of a complicated holiday-themed treat while half-drunk on wine.
Pic: Wenn.com