Juan Pablo di Pace is PETA’s Brightest On-Screen Star for Animals
Fuller House Actor Nabs Libby Award for Combating Circus Cruelty
For Immediate Release:
December 9, 2019
Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382
For urging families around the world not to buy tickets to circuses that use animals, Fuller House star Juan Pablo Di Pace has been named PETA’s Brightest On-Screen Star for Animals. The honor is part of PETA’s 14th annual Libby Awards (“Libby” is short for “liberation”—as in “animal liberation”), in which the group’s youth division recognizes the most powerful players on the animal rights scene.
Di Pace starred in a PETA campaign, declaring, “I have a special love for felines. … To see what things are done to them in the circus is really upsetting … they sleep in tiny cages. They’re forced to do things they don’t want to do. [Handlers] beat them up. So what we see in the circus is just a fraction of what these … animals have to go through.” This year, the actor joined PETA, Joaquin Phoenix, Lucy Davis, and others at a news conference promoting California’s Circus Cruelty Prevention Act, which ultimately passed.
“Juan Pablo Di Pace refuses to sit by and watch as tigers are whipped into performing cruel tricks and denied everything that’s natural and important to them,” says PETA Senior Director of Youth Programs Marta Holmberg. “PETA is recognizing him for using his star power to speak up for animals exploited and abused in the entertainment industry.”
Other nominees in his category included Sofía Sisniega, who went naked to protest Forever 21’s sale of wool; Christopher Von Uckermann, who went underwater to protest SeaWorld’s cruelty to orcas and other dolphins; and Ruby Rose, who’s such an outspoken vegan that The CW’s writers made her Batwoman character vegan, too.
Di Pace joins fellow 2019 award recipients Billie Eilish (Best Voice for Animals), Millie Bobby Brown (Best Side Hustle for Animals), and Greta Thunberg (Youth Role Model of the Year) and will receive a framed certificate.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview that fosters violence toward other animals. For more information, please visit PETA.org or click here.
