RESIST

Olivia Wilde, Mark Ruffalo, and More Celebs Took to the Streets to Protest Donald Trump

“We want him to hear us,” Ruffalo said at the march and vigil for Heather Heyer that he organized with Michael Moore.

Aug. 16, 2017

Michael Moore Takes His Broadway Audience To Trump Tower To Protest

Noam Galai/Getty Images

The director Michael Moore doesn’t typically work with actors like Olivia Wilde and Mark Ruffalo, but on Tuesday night, the trio teamed up to join the thousands that have gathered this week in New York to protest Donald Trump’s quite unwelcome homecoming to Trump Tower for the first time since his inauguration.

“There’s two sides of this: people who fight Nazis, and Nazis, and that’s it,” Ruffalo said in a video with his “buddy” Moore, who wore a black baseball cap reading “NO SURRENDER,” that he posted on Instagram from 58th Street and Fifth Avenue, just one block north of the Tower.

“We want him to hear us. We want him to know that an American killed on American soil by a Nazi is not acceptable,” Ruffalo continued, adding in his caption that he also planned to make it to the candlelight vigil for Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old woman who was murdered over the weekend in the deathly violence that ensued at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, which Trump still has yet to really condemn.

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They weren’t the only celebrities in the crowd: Zoe Kazan, who showed up when the outrage kicked off the previous night, along with Anna Baryshnikov, returned on Wednesday—this time along with Marisa Tomei. Stealing the show, though, was definitely Olivia Wilde, who eventually met up to march with Moore and Ruffalo, carrying a giant sign emblazoned with the hashtag “#RESIST,” as any good star of an adaptation of George Orwell’s chillingly dystopian 1984 would.

Mark Ruffalo and Olivia Wilde alongside Michael Moore as he leads his Broadway audience to Trump Tower to protest President Donald Trump.

Noam Galai/Getty Images

After all, much of the action that night started on Broadway, when Moore invited the audience who showed up for a performance of his play The Terms of My Surrender—which included Harvey Weinstein and his wife, the designer Georgina Chapman—to a quick “little field trip” to Trump Tower; it turned out he even had a charter bus lined up. Once there, they received another performance: A clearly riled up Ruffalo gave a speech to the crowd encouraging them to say Heyer’s name and condemn the president: “He’s allowed these people, he’s allowed fascism, he’s allowed the KKK, he’s allowed Nazis to show their ugly face, and we’re here to remind him there’s a cost for that,” he yelled, paper cup in hand.

Wilde was then called on to lead a chant, including the phrases “stand up for justice,” and the mouthful “Trump is not a legitimate president”; Kazan followed up with her own slogans of “we reject fascism” and “we reject white supremacy.”

To end the star-studded, thankfully non-violent protest, Ruffalo reportedly referred to the crowd as the Avengers. Given the violence since Charlottesville, his comparison might seem a bit too lighthearted, but that end-of-the-world feeling hits close to home.