Ryan Reynolds And Blake Lively ‘Deeply And Unreservedly Sorry’ For Plantation Wedding

Ryan Reynolds is apologizing for holding his wedding to Blake Lively at Boone Hall in South Carolina, back in 2012.

Boone Hall is one of America’s oldest plantations, built in 1681. But like other plantations in the US, Boone Hall was built on the backs of slaves. The plantation had as many as 85 slaves from the time it was built until the American Civil War. They harvested cotton, pecans and other crops as well as produced bricks. 

Following the war, the plantation continued to grow agricultural crops and continues to do so today. In 1935, Canadian Thomas Stone purchased Boone Hall. During his time there, he built an electrical plant that powered the plantation using tides in a nearby river. 

The current owners have put in a lot of work to preserve the original structures. This includes  preserving 9 of the original slave cabins and the cotton docks. Today, Boone Hall offers historical tours, which include an exhibit on ‘Black History in America’. The exhibit has mixed reviews. 

One tour attendee shares, “I am not an expert on slavery history but I knew they were making it sound much better than what it was. The focus of the talk was limited to how slave houses were built, using leftover (not-good-enough- for-sale) bricks.” She goes on to explain that “there was nothing specific said about the treatment of slaves at the plantation” but regarding the history of slavery, “the exhibition was refreshingly honest”. 

Boone Hall has also been used as a filming location for The Notebook, Days of Our Lives, and other films and shows. And it’s a venue for weddings, including the wedding of Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, with parties taking pictures outside the slave cabins and at the cotton docks. 

People previously criticized the couple’s choice of venue in 2012. But when Reynolds tweeted his support for Black Panther’s majority black cast, the issue was brought back to light. 

When asked about their wedding during an interview with Fast Company, Reynolds said that having their wedding at Boone Hall is “something we’ll always be deeply and unreservedly sorry for.”

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

In regards to plantation weddings, Pinterest has said in interviews that they’re “working to limit the distribution of this content and accounts across our platform, and continue to not accept advertisements for them.” 

Currently, the social site is limiting content, search recommendation and notifications related to plantation weddings. Pinterest will warn users who look up the term that some content may violate its policies. 

And while there’s no way for the Hollywood couple to take back their decision, they have tried to do better moving forward. 

In May, Lively and Reynolds donated $200,000 to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) following the death of George Floyd. On Instagram they shared, “We’re ashamed that in the past we’ve allowed ourselves to be uninformed about how deeply rooted systemic racism is … We want to educate ourselves about other people’s experiences and talk to our kids about everything, all of it … especially our own complicity.”

RELATED: Reynolds and Lively to match donations made to UN Refugee Agency …

This was after a reported pair of $1 million donations he and Lively made last year. These donations went to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights.

Reynolds has also launched Group Effort Initiative (GEI), a diversity program to train minorities to work in the entertainment industry. Just recently, GEI partnered with Netflix on a new initiative to secure placements on multiple Netflix productions.