It’s time to play “Hollywood Swears,” the game where we tell you dumb things celebrities say and you determine if they’re lying or just stupid. Today we have big star Ryan Reynolds swearing he and actress wife Blake Lively really, really, really, super regret something. It’s up to you to say whether he's full of it or has it for brains!
Recently, Fast Company asked Reynolds about his 2012 wedding to Lively. That was back in the dark days before Black Lives Matter emerged to purge our privilege and nuke our nuclear families. The venue the couple selected was Boone Hall near Charleston, S.C., a big old southern plantation house. We can assume it was a nice event.
But in our woke present day, Reynolds is contrite (the word "groveling" also comes to mind.) The death of George Floyd has, as Fast Company put it, forced him “to grapple with his own complicated personal history.” Yes, his complicated history amounts to choosing the wrong place to get hitched.
Now, Reynolds vomits social justice platitudes all over the article, to the point where he’s caricature of lefty guilt. Apparently all he reads these days are NAACP pamphlets, because can’t seem to stop saying things like “We want to educate ourselves about other people’s experiences and talk to our kids about everything, all of it ... especially our own complicity.” (He and Blake are raising their kids “so they never grow up feeding this insane pattern and so they'll do their best to never inflict pain on another being consciously or unconsciously." Hey Ryan, if you do anything less, you’re a sociopath.)
But for the purposes of Hollywood Swears, here’s important paragraph:
The actor is still clearly pained by the hurt the wedding caused, as well as by his own lack of judgment. “It’s something we’ll always be deeply and unreservedly sorry for,” he says. “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 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.”
Okay, contestants, your choice is clear:
Is he full of it ...?
Apparently nobody cared about the wedding venue until 2018 when he was prostrating himself before the racial comic book flick Black Panther and a Twitter mob came for him. Sure, the guilt may have been eating him alive, but right now he’s wearing that guilt on his very expensive sleeve and using it as a springboard to launch himself into the middle of a fashionable social trend. Also, what the hell kind of marriage do you have when all you can do is look back on the nuptials and moan about shame?
… Or does he have it for brains?
Given the state of our education system, and the intellectual firepower of most modern celebrities, it’s entirely possible that two big Hollywood stars were ignorant of what might have gone on at an antebellum South Carolina plantation home. Or maybe they lacked the moral imagination to understand the implications. Or both. The zeal with which he now says all the correct things may indicate a sincere conversion to the secular religion of “anti-racism,” and the easy grace it offers. (He even bought an indulgence with a $250K donation to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.)
Bonus for “Full of It” voters!
Did Reynolds (or his publicist) ask Fast Company to ask him about the wedding?
