Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds has apologised for holding his wedding with Blake Lively at a former slave plantation.
The Deadpool and Gossip Girl stars got married in 2012 at Boone Hall, South Carolina, which Reynolds now admits was a “giant f****** mistake”.
The 43-year-old told Fast Company website it was 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,” he said.
“What we saw after was a place built upon devastating tragedy.”
The Canadian star said he and Lively got married again at home, but that “shame works in weird ways”.
“A giant f****** mistake like that can either cause you to shut down or it can reframe things and move you into action,” said Reynolds.
“It doesn’t mean you won’t f*** up again. But repatterning and challenging lifelong social conditioning is a job that doesn’t end.”
In June – in the wake of the George Floyd killing – Reynolds posted a lengthy message on Instagram in which he said the couple were “ashamed that in the past we’ve allowed ourselves to be uninformed about how deeply rooted systemic racism is”.
He also revealed in the post that they had donated $200,000 (£150,000) to the NAACP legal defence fund.
Reynolds told Fast Company they had also donated $1m (£750,000) to the fund last year and the same amount to a group looking after immigrant children’s rights.
Since their wedding, the Hollywood couple have started a family of their own – three daughters aged five, three and 10 months.