Gina Carano remains unapologetic about posts that got her fired ‘Star Wars’
Controversial actress Gina Carano wants her career back, and she wants to get it without apologizing.
Carano, who filed a wrongful termination and discrimination lawsuit against Disney and Lucasfilm in February with financial backing from Elon Musk via X, tells her side of the story in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter. And she remains unapologetic about the events that led to her getting dropped from the “Star Wars” franchise.
“You won’t find a perfect person in me, but you will find a person who was doing her absolute best under one of the most aggressive unnecessary cancellations in Hollywood history,” she said. “This has been one of the toughest growth spurts of my life and I don’t plan on wasting what I have learned.”
In 2021, Disney fired the former mixed martial arts star from her role as interstellar marshal Cara Dune in “The Mandalorian” and a planned spinoff called “Rangers of the New Republic” after a long string of social media activity that was deemed offensive, including comments about the 2020 election, the coronavirus vaccine, and reposting a meme that posited “hating someone for their political views” is the start of a slippery slope that leads to violence like the Holocaust. Carano also came under fire for putting fake pronouns in her Twitter bio (“boop/bop/beep”), an act that many considered transphobic.
“Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future,” a Lucasfilm spokesperson said at the time. “Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”
Now, Carano is seeking damages in the form of monetary compensation and a court order that she be recast on the show, according to the Associated Press. She claims that Lucasfilm hurt her future work prospects by making “maliciously false” statements about her by demanding a public apology in which she admitted, “to mocking or insulting an entire group of people, which Carano had never done.” (Asked if he had any comment on the lawsuit during an interview with CNBC, Disney CEO Bob Iger simply said he had “none.” Disney has until April 9 to respond to the lawsuit.)
In the THR interview, Carano said she’s fighting back against a system of political suppression that made her “unhireable.” After her firing, “it becomes OK for other people to disrespect you,” she said. “And then you’re just carrying around this disrespect, and you’re shouldering all this shame, and it affects your physicality, your mentality. You’re just kind of hopeless. So to be able to fight back — it makes me feel like, ‘OK. That feels good.’ ”
Carano expressed no regrets over the posts that led to her firing. Regarding the Holocaust meme that marked Disney’s final straw, she said its content still made sense to her. “Don’t hate your neighbor,” she says. “Before the Nazis were as powerful as they became, you had to make it OK to hate this person next to you. That’s how we get to dangerous places. And history does repeat itself.” (Her friend, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, told THR that he doesn’t think her post was antisemitic.)
As for “beep/bop/boop,” she says, “Seriously? This was the start of the end for me? A 20-year career, the blood, sweat and tears of fighting? I never compromised myself for a job. I never ended in a bad situation where I did anything inappropriate. I had a clean and clear climb to where I got to and was going to just keep going. And boop/bop/beep was that harmful?”
She said she’s not concerned about getting money from Disney. “I’m thinking about clearing my name,” she said. “I’m thinking about finally being healthier and having this monkey off my back and telling my story and just getting on with my life. Finally.”
Since her firing from Disney, she has found work in right-wing cinema, starring in a Western called “Terror on the Prairie” that was distributed by conservative media company The Daily Wire, and playing a Secret Service agent in a satirical comedy about Hunter Biden called “My Son Hunter” that was distributed by conservative media company Breitbart.
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