Actor Ryan Reynolds has apologized for his 2012 wedding to Blake Lively. The Deadpool star told Fast Company that he and his wife would always be “unreservedly sorry” for getting married at Boone Hall Plantation & Gardens in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.

“It’s impossible to reconcile,” the 43-year-old said in the profile, which was published on Tuesday, August 4. “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 f**king 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 f**k up again. But repatterning and challenging lifelong social conditioning is a job that doesn’t end.”

When they were married in 2012, the couple didn’t received much backlash for the venue. In 2018, some social media users brought up the location after Ryan took to Twitter and praised Marvel’s Black Panther — which featured a largely Black cast. At the time, followers called the actor out after he posted, “All hail the king,” alongside a photo of Chadwick Boseman starring as T’Challa in the superhero movie.

Since then, the couple has focused their philanthropy initiatives on social justice. In 2019, Ryan and Blake donated $2 million to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. Then in May 2020, they donated another donating another $200,000 to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund following the tragic deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

Following the donation, both Ryan and Blake took to Instagram with messages that read, “We want to educate ourselves about other people’s experiences and talk to our kids about everything, all of it . . . especially our own complicity.”

Through his production company and marketing agency, Maximum Effort, Ryan has also made diverse hiring a priority.

“Representation and diversity need to be completely immersive,” he told Fast Company. “Like, it needs to be embedded at the root of storytelling, and that’s in both marketing and Hollywood. When you add perspective and insight that isn’t your own, you grow. And you grow your company too.”

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