Evangeline Lilly condemned Disney’s recent Marvel layoffs in an Instagram video on Wednesday, saying she was stunned that the company let go of the artists who helped build the current Marvel Universe. Lilly called the cuts “disgusting and horrible” and said she stood with the employees affected.
She said she first saw the layoffs on social media and then reached out to Andy Park to ask if they were real. Park told her, “Yeah, it’s true. I have been let go.” Lilly said she could not believe that Disney had cut loose “the artists who brought the current Marvel Universe to life through their imagination and their genius.”
The layoffs came earlier this month, when Disney said it was letting go of 1,000 employees as part of a push to streamline operations. Deadline reported that 8 percent of Marvel’s workforce was eliminated and that its visual development team was significantly gutted. Lilly, who plays Janet Van Dyne, also known as The Wasp, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, said the people who invented and designed the characters were being replaced by AI.
That is the friction at the center of her criticism. Disney’s chief executive, Josh D’Amaro, has framed the job cuts as a business decision aimed at efficiency, but Lilly cast them as an attack on the human artists behind the franchise. She said the MCU and its heroes were human creations and should not be stolen by tech giants so their robots can replicate them. She also apologized to Park and other employees who lost their jobs.
Lilly urged California lawmakers to protect artists’ work from artificial intelligence. Her remarks carry added weight because she announced in 2024 that she would be stepping away from acting, making this one of the few public comments she has offered since then. The question now is not whether she spoke plainly; it is whether her warning will land anywhere beyond Instagram, where the layoffs she condemned have already become another test of how Hollywood handles AI, labor and ownership.