The simple act of sharing images from a rally against coronavirus vaccine mandates last year was always going to “wake the giant,” Marvel’s Ant-Man star Evangeline Lilly admitted during an interview published Friday.
“I know the beast that I’m attacking,” Lilly told Clay Skipper of Esquire, recalling her thoughts ahead of sharing the post from a Washington, DC, protest 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.”
The public event in question drew protesters to the nation’s capital in support of “bodily sovereignty,” as Breitbart News reported.
File/Demonstrators gather during an anti-vaccine mandate rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, Jan. 23, 2022. (Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty)
The star of ABC’s Lost revealed in the Instagram post she was there in support of protesters marching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial to voice their opposition to forced injections.
It went ahead as Canadian truckers were holding “Freedom Convoy” protests of their own north of the border challenging that country’s vaccine mandates.
Lilly said her fundamental support for “freedom of choice” remains true to this day.
“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.”
The Canadian-born Lilly told Esquire she debated with herself whether or not to go proceed with the post “about six hundred times” before eventually going ahead.
“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.
The anti-mandate protest march pictures were not the first time Lilly entered the coronavirus vaccination debate.
Evangeline Lilly arrives on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon Thursday, February 9, 2023. (Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Images)
Lilly announced she was ignoring the warnings to self-quarantine at the start of the outbreak, admitting to her millions of social media in March, 2020, she was living with her cancer-stricken father.
“Just dropped my kids off at gymnastics camp. They all washed their hands before going in. They are playing and laughing,” Lilly said to her two million Instagram followers.
A week later she apologized, having received severe backlash, and said she would stay at home with her family and practice social distancing.
But the Hollywood star noted she was following local government guidelines despite her “intense trepidation over the socioeconomic and political repercussions of this course of action.”