It wasn’t as if Blake Lively hadn’t been warned about flirting with the lore of the Antebellum South.

Eight years ago certain eyebrows were raised when she and Ryan Reynolds got married at Boone Hall, a former slave plantation in South Carolina — a foolhardy thing by current standards but slightly less so eight years ago.

Roughly two years later refinery29’s Leeann Duggan posted a tut-tut piece titled “Oh, No: Blake Lively Pens An Ode To The Pre-Civil War South.” And three years ago The Daily Beast‘s Amy Zimmerman posted an article called “Blake Lively Needs to Get Woke — and Fast,” which partly referenced Preserve and the Antebellum thing.

So now Reynolds is gallantly taking a bullet for his wife, even though the slave plantation ceremony was totally her idea. This is what good husbands do, of course.

The 43-year-old actor addressed the eight-year-old controversy in an 8.4 interview with Fast Company “It’s something we’ll always be deeply and unreservedly sorry for,” Reynolds said. “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 re-patterning and challenging lifelong social conditioning is a job that doesn’t end.”

Inner Reynolds plea during interview: “Please, descendants of Pol Pot and Maximilien Robespierre…don’t come after Blake and me! We’re good family people, we have kids, we just wanna make movies and entertain and make a lot of money and have a good time. Please don’t shut us down…please.”

Does Hollywood Elsewhere need to be re-patterned? Where could I go to have it done? Are there any re-patterning specialists I can hire in the West Hollywood area?

Yes, the Boone Hall nuptials were on the insensitive side but get real — 2020 culture is a lot different than that of 2012.

Eight years ago there wasn’t this instant BLM socio-political nightmare associated with Southern plantations. 12 Years A Slave hadn’t even been filmed at that point. Eleven years before the Reynolds-Lively wedding a scene from Peter Chelsom and Warren Beatty‘s Town and Country was partly filmed on a storied Southern plantation. And Forrest Gump, of course, had been filmed on a Georgia plantation eight years before that.