Evangeline Lilly learned the Marvel layoffs were real the same way many fans did — by reaching out to someone she knew. The actress, who played Hope van Dyne in the Ant-Man films, contacted Andy Park, the artist who designed the Wasp suit she wore in 2015's original Ant-Man. He confirmed he had been let go.
That confirmation prompted Lilly to post a video to Instagram calling out The Walt Disney Company directly. "SHAME ON YOU for turning your back on the people who built the power you are now using to throw them away," she wrote in the caption.
Disney's company-wide cuts reduced Marvel's workforce by roughly 8 percent, hitting film and TV production, comics, franchise, finance, legal, and visual development. The visual department took the hardest blow, Deadline reported, even after a smaller round of cuts in 2024.
In the video, Lilly said she was struggling to process what had happened. "I can't quite believe that Disney have let go of the artists who brought the current Marvel Universe to life through their imagination and their genius," she said. "The people who invented these characters in the first place, who designed them in the first place, are now being replaced by AI. AI that will take their designs and take what those artists created and use it to create iterations of that."
She singled out Park by name and extended her condolences beyond him to the wider group of affected workers. "I am so sorry to every single one of the artists who were let go in the 1,000 artists that Disney fired, and particularly the entire team at Marvel who have been considered obsolete now after building the Marvel empire."
Lilly was direct about where she placed the blame. The artists' work, she said, represents "human creations, and they shouldn't be stolen by tech giants so that their robots can replicate them. I think it's disgusting and horrible, and I stand with all the artists and Andy."
Lilly appeared in four MCU projects across eight years: Ant-Man in 2015, Ant-Man and the Wasp in 2018, Avengers: Endgame in 2019, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in 2023. Disney has not publicly responded to her remarks.
