ongoing

Ayo Edebiri has addressed the ongoing work of the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements after being pointedly excluded from a question in favour of her white co-stars.

While in Venice on a press tour for the upcoming Luca Guadagnino film After The Hunt, which is pegged as a post #MeToo psychological thriller, Andrew Garfield, Julia Roberts and Edebiri were asked what was “lost during the politically correct era”.

The reporter also asked what we have to expect in Hollywood, now that “the Me Too movement and Black Lives Matter are done”.

Roberts then asked them to repeat the question, seemingly inviting the reporter to address all the actors, saying, “With your sunglasses on, I can’t tell which of us you’re talking to.” However, they clarified that the question was only for Garfield and Roberts.

Edebiri looked around the room, stunned after being excluded from the question, saying: “Yeah, I know that that’s not for me, and I don’t know if it’s purposeful if it’s not me, but I just am curious.”

Ayo Edebiri eloquently talks about the political state of the hashtag “Me Too” & the Black Lives Matter movement after being deliberately excluded from the question by an interviewer for their ‘After the Hunt’ press tour.

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— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) September 7, 2025

“I don’t think it’s done,” she continued, to agreement from Roberts. “I don’t think it’s done at all. I think maybe hashtags might not be used as much, but I do think that there’s work being done by activists, by people, every day, that’s beautiful, important work that’s not finished, that’s really, really, really active – for a reason, because this world is really charged.

“And that work isn’t finished at all.”

She said while mainstream coverage of Me Too and Black Lives Matter might not dominate headlines as much as it did at the peak of the respective movements, it didn’t mean that the work was done.

Garfield agreed, and concurred that “the movements are still absolutely alive”, but “maybe not as witnessed or kind of magnified as much in this present moment”.

Fans on social media were shocked she’d been excluded from the question, given not only was she the only Black woman in the room, but her first major acting role had a direct connection to the aftereffects of the BLM movement.

In 2020, Edebiri took over voicing the character Missy in Big Mouth, having been originally voiced by Jenny Slate, a white Jewish actress, who later apologised for playing Missy, a biracial teenager with a white mother and a Black father.

Edebiri spoke to Entertainment Weekly at the time about Slate’s decision, and how broader culture was shifting in order to make space for marginalised actors. “I’ve thinking about a lot about how so much has changed, like even in my lifetime,” The Bear star said.

“Sometimes I’ll watch older movies, and often not even that old, and they’re using slurs that are unbelievable and people are pretending to be people with disabilities and winning Oscars, and you’re like, ‘Huh?’ We discovered that this was wrong and we’ve corrected it.

“I think, to me, this is a faster version of that in a way. It’s like, okay, we realised it, and we’re seeing it happen in real time that what we thought was acceptable maybe isn’t, and we’re learning why and learning to have conversations about it in real time, too.

She later spoke to The New York Times about how the role made her a target of racism online, which she has continued to be as recently as of last year, when Edebiri received “insane death threats and racial slurs” after Elon Musk spread misinformation about her being cast in a “fake reboot” of Pirates of the Caribbean.