Evangeline Lilly Says She knew She Would ‘Wake the Giant’ With Anti-Vax Mandate Rally Photos After Backlash

Published on February 19th, 2023 | Updated on February 19th, 2023 | By FanFest

When Evangeline Lilly shared photos from an anti-vaccine mandate rally in Washington, D.C., last year, she realized that her action would draw attention and spark debate on the issue. She had set out to “wake the giant”.

“I know the beast that I’m attacking,” the “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” star told Esquire in an interview published Friday, recalling what she was thinking when she shared the post on Instagram. “I know that I have a little pebble and there’s this f—— Goliath giant.”

She continued, “If I shoot this pebble, it’s going to wake the giant.”

In early January 2022, renowned actress Evangeline Lilly shared photographs of her attending a rally to highlight the importance of bodily autonomy. She joined truckers at Canadian demonstrations against compulsory vaccination mandates and voiced out that this is simply not safe nor acceptable: “This is not the way”.

“I believe nobody should ever be forced to inject their body with anything, against their will,” she captioned her post at the time, adding, “This is not the way. This is not safe. This is not healthy. This is not love. I understand the world is in fear, but I don’t believe that answering fear with force will fix our problems. I was pro-choice before COVID and I am still pro-choice today.”

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Lilly told Esquire she debated “about six hundred times” on whether to post it.

“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.

Early in the pandemic, the actor faced criticism for an Instagram post featuring her children leaving gymnastics with a #businessasusual hashtag. In March 2020, she apologized for her insensitivity during those uncertain times.

“I didn’t expect anyone to pay attention to it, because no one ever pays attention to what I post,” she told Esquire.

Lilly said that she decided to apologize a little more than a week later, because “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.”