The silence that has largely blanketed Hollywood since the Trump administration deployed thousands of federal agents to Minneapolis appeared to crack this weekend in the wake of the killing of ICU nurse Alex Pretti.
Two celebrities known for speaking their values — “The Last of Us” star Pedro Pascal and singer Billie Eilish — were among the loudest.
Pascal shared multiple posts to his Instagram Sunday night drawing attention to the killing of both Pretti and Renee Good, who was fatally shot by a federal agent in Minneapolis on January 7.
One of Pascal’s posts included drawings of Pretti and Good with the words “Pretti Good reason for a national strike” along with snippets from a New York Times editorial titled “Two People Are Dead. Americans Deserve to Know the Truth.”
Actress Jamie Lee Curtis shared the same image on Instagram. Actor Edward Norton, speaking to the Los Angeles Times at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, also called for a general strike.
Writing on Instagram, Pascal said: “Truth is a line of demarcation between a democratic government and authoritarian regime. Mr Pretti and Renee Good are dead. The American people deserve to know what happened.” He also tagged the New York Times.
On Instagram, Eilish posted to her stories several times, including one calling Pretti “a real American hero.” Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was repeatedly shot after being tackled by federal agents in a confrontation caught on video.
Eilish called out the overwhelming silence from many of America’s cultural luminaries, posting a selfie with the words: “hey my fellow celebrities u gonna speak up? or”
By Monday morning, singer Katy Perry was urging her Instagram followers to write to their senators.
The slow roll began over the weekend, as Natalie Portman and Olivia Wilde appeared at Sundance wearing pins reading “ICE Out,” which were also donned by several actors at the Golden Globes earlier this month.
“I could not be prouder to be American right now, by the way the Americans are acting. And I could not be sadder to be American right now with the way the government is behaving,” Portman, whose film “The Gallerist” is opening at the festival, told Deadline.
Speaking on the Sundance red carpet, Wilde told The Associated Press she was “horrified” by the deaths at the hands of federal agents and that she believed many Americans were as well.
“I think it’s appalling,” said Wilde, in Sundance to promote “The Invite,” which she both stars in and directs.
“It’s really difficult to be here and to be celebrating something so joyous and beautiful and positive when we know what’s happening on the streets. Americans are out on the streets marching and demanding justice and we’re there with them.”
Elsewhere, actors Mark Ruffalo and Glenn Close, no strangers to speaking out, also condemned the violence by federal agents.
“Alex Pretti is a hero,” Ruffalo wrote on Bluesky, resharing a post about Pretti being a nurse with the Veterans Administration and a dog owner.
Prior to that he also shared a link to the video of Pretti being shot, writing: “Cold blooded murder in the streets of the USA by an occupying military gang, creating havoc. We have fought wars in other countries for less than this.”
On Instagram, Close read from prepared remarks, saying that while she has been mostly out of the country since September, she has “watched, with the rest of the world, our democracy being systematically disemboweled and torn apart.”
“I am outraged and sickened by what is happening under the Trump regime: the cruelty, inhumanity, and arrogance,” she said. “The voracious corruption, the cowardice, the sickening hypocrisy, the blatant manipulation of facts, and now the cold-blooded murder of American citizens.”
Close ended her remarks by saying she believed “the great American body politic is stirring, waking up and taking in what’s going on.”
“And, mark my words, there will be hell to pay,” she concluded.
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