Actors Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively are owning up to their past mistakes. In an interview, Reynolds apologised on behalf of the couple for hosting their 2012 wedding at Boone Hall, a former plantation in South Carolina.

Speaking to Fast Company, Reynolds said the decision is “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 f*cking 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.”

Original coverage of their wedding glazed over the venue, but the controversy began in 2018 when Reynolds tweeted out his support of the Black Panther film, which had a majority black cast. Many accused Reynolds of being hypocritical for supporting black people in public but marrying at a venue that has such racist connotations.

This is the first time the pair have directly spoke about the controversy. Earlier in 2020 at the start of the protests that began after the death of George Floyd, they posted on Instagram  “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.”

They also announced they had donated $200 000 to the NAACP legal defense fund.

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The wedding industry has also since acknowledged the dark history of American plantations. In December 2019, Pinterest, The Knot Worldwide, Brides and Zola announced that they would be making changes to their platform that would restrict all references to plantations, as well as any language attempting to romanticise these locations as wedding venues.

This move is in response to a campaign led by racial justice organisation, Color of Change, who argued that the wedding industry was glamourising and capatalising sites of human rights atrocities.

Many plantations in America thrived off slave labour and became places of human rights abuse for the people forced into these demeaning positions. As such, they’ve become painful reminders of a dark and sordid history for many African Americans who descended from such slaves.