The internet has a renewed interest in Blake Lively & Ryan Reynolds’ grossly problematic wedding locale
Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds are a Hollywood megacouple, and they’re having an … interesting moment right now. Lively’s It Ends With Us and Reynolds’ Deadpool and Wolverine are both out in cinemas and pulling in millions.
But there’s been some much-publicized drama surrounding It Ends With Us. Lively is allegedly in the midst of a feud with director/co-star Justin Baldoni, and the controversy has caused a wave of negative press for Lively. She’s been criticized for deliberately mis-aiming the marketing of the movie (it’s actually about domestic violence, but you’d have difficulty working that out) and a few days ago an old interview of hers resurfaced where she was incredibly rude to a journalist. But as all this has gone on, something else has found renewed attention online: the location where she and Reynolds chose to get married back in 2012.
She and Reynolds were wed on a former slave plantation, a fact that shocks most people when they first hear about it. (Perhaps even more shocking is just how common this is in many parts of the South.)
This was Boone Hall Plantation & Gardens in South Carolina, and the couple later expressed extreme regret for having gotten married there. Reynolds told Fast Company in 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, that they were “deeply and unreservedly sorry” about it. Reynolds said, “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.” Reynolds revealed in the interview that he and Lively ended up having a second wedding at their home, wanting to re-do their vows in a better place… but that hasn’t stopped people from remembering the original and bringing it up on X (formerly Twitter) whenever either of the pair are in the news.
Reynolds continued, “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.”
And to be fair, Reynolds and Lively did try to put their money where their mouths were. They donated $200,000 to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund that year. They also put out a statement on Instagram saying, “We’ve been teaching our children differently than the way our parents taught us. We want to educate ourselves about other people’s experiences and talk to our kids about everything, all of it… especially our own complicity.”
However, it’s worth pointing out that Lively also once published a feature titled “The Allure of Antebellum” in her online lifestyle magazine, Preserve, that romanticized Southern white women who would have very likely owned slaves. Even back in 2014 that was considered incredibly tone-deaf, and today it follows her around the same as the plantation wedding does.
It remains to be seen if there will ever come a time when social media doesn’t remind Lively of these skeletons in her closet.
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