Nicole Kidman Joins Viola Davis and Stars for 9/11's 25th Charity Day

Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks reshaped the world, the date itself has become something of a ritual of collective remembrance — and for Cantor Fitzgerald, that ritual takes a uniquely purposeful form. On Friday, September 11, 2026, Nicole Kidman was among a wide constellation of celebrities who stepped onto the trading floor at BGC Group in New York City to participate in the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund's annual Charity Day, an event that transforms grief into measurable generosity.

A Tradition Born from Unimaginable Loss

The weight behind Charity Day is difficult to overstate. Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial services firm, lost 658 of its employees in the 2001 attacks — the single largest loss of life suffered by any company that day. Out of that devastation, the firm built a tradition: every year on September 11, employees voluntarily forgo an entire day's pay, and both Cantor Fitzgerald and BGC Group donate 100 percent of their revenues to a broad range of direct service charities worldwide through the Relief Fund. The event functions less like a conventional fundraiser and more like a living memorial — one that converts the memory of absence into concrete, forward-moving support for communities around the globe.

A Star-Studded Show of Solidarity

According to Just Jared, this year's Charity Day drew an impressively varied roster of public figures. Joining [Nicole Kidman](/ article/nicole-kidman-and-zoe-saldana-lead-lioness-season-3-premiere-in-nyc) on the trading floor were actress and activist Viola Davis, social media personality Alix Earle, Broadway legend Kristin Chenoweth, and rapper Nicki Minaj. The gathering also included actor and comedian Kenan Thompson, Academy Award nominee Djimon Hounsou, rising actress Marsai Martin, dance icon Misty Copeland, and Cobra Kai veteran Ralph Macchio, among many others. The breadth of representation — spanning film, television, music, sports, and digital media — speaks to the event's unusual ability to draw participants across industries and generations.

Celebrity ambassadors at Charity Day are each aligned with causes meaningful to Cantor Fitzgerald's employees, clients, and broader community, effectively channeling the outpouring of goodwill the firm received in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 back into the world.

Kidman's Ongoing Engagement Beyond the Screen

For Kidman, whose public profile has remained unusually multidimensional — balancing prestige film and television work with visible philanthropic and cultural participation — the appearance is consistent with a pattern of showing up where the moment calls for it. Earlier this year she was spotted among Hollywood royalty in Wimbledon's Royal Box, and her professional slate remains as demanding as ever, with Josh Lucas recently joining her and Elle Fanning in a new legal thriller. She also continues her high-profile television work, most recently headlining Lioness.

That range — from the intimacy of personal tributes to her late mother and daughter Sunday Rose to large-scale public events like Charity Day — has long defined how Kidman navigates her public life: deliberately, and with evident intentionality.

What the Day Represents

What makes Charity Day genuinely resonant, beyond the celebrity wattage, is its architectural logic. Rather than asking stars to simply lend their names to a cause, the event places them literally inside the institution that bore the most concentrated human cost of September 11. The trading floor becomes a site of both memory and action — a space where the past is acknowledged not through passive commemoration but through the tangible work of raising funds that flow directly to people in need. That design, sustained now for a quarter-century, reflects a particular philosophy: that the most durable response to catastrophic loss is not a monument, but an ongoing practice of care.