“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” star Evangeline Lilly is speaking up about her stance on mandated COVID vaccinations, telling Esquire that the backlash she received after attending an anti-vax rally in Washington D.C. in January 2022 was something she fully expected.
Back in 2022, Lilly revealed on Instagram that she was among the protesters at a rally in Washington opposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The post included black-and-white pictures taken at what appeared to be the same rally where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust.
At the time she remembered thinking, “’I know the beast that I’m attacking. I know that I have a little pebble and there’s this f–ing Goliath giant. If I shoot this pebble, it’s going to wake the giant.’”
In the new interview, Lilly explained her intentions behind attending the rally and to make it known that she was there.
“I just wanted people out there who were struggling because they were under severe pressure to do something they didn’t want to do to know that they weren’t alone, to know that there were people who actually felt they had a right to say no,” she said.
Lilly said she had already gotten a taste of the controversy she would face from another social media post she’d made two years earlier.
In March 2020, at the height of lockdowns and quarantines, she shared a picture of herself after taking her children to gymnastics with the caption, “#businessasusual.”
“I didn’t expect anyone to pay attention to it, because no one ever pays attention to what I post,” she explained.
“I ended up having enough people say to me, ‘Well, there’s a lot of people who are dying right now, and it might have been really insensitive to what they’re going through,’ and that resonated for me,” prompting her to post an apology 10 days later.
“Ant-Man: Quantumania” premieres in theaters this weekend. You can read TheWrap’s interview with Lilly here.
