FRIDAY UPDATE:
Gina Carano has now made a statement after her firing from The Mandalorian. The actor, making no apology for her tweets, told industry site Deadline that she will soon be working with conservative website The Daily Wire on a new film project.
“The Daily Wire is helping make one of my dreams — to develop and produce my own film — come true. I cried out and my prayer was answered. I am sending out a direct message of hope to everyone living in fear of cancellation by the totalitarian mob. I have only just begun using my voice which is now freer than ever before, and I hope it inspires others to do the same. They can’t cancel us if we don’t let them,” she said.
The Daily Wire‘s first feature film and recent controversial release was Run Hide Fight, about a school-girl grabbing weapons to take on live-streaming shooters at her school.
It’s been rumoured for a while that while Gina Carano’s character Cara Dune was a well-liked character in The Mandalorian‘s two seasons to date, that her opinions off-screen were proving more… divisive.
In recent months the former MMA and Haywire star stated that she believed that there was massive voter fraud that cost Trump the 2020 US election ( a claim without any proof or merit after countless high-profile court-cases) and received a lot of criticism over her seeming mockery of transgender pronouns, including a rebuke from co-star Pedro Pascal whose own sibling is transgender (she later apologised). A December tweet she posted showed an image of a group of men playing Monopoly on the backs of a group of naked men and a caption “All We Have to Do is Stand Up and Their Little Game is Over.” which had been widely circulated in connection with the anti-Semitic conspiracy claim that a cabal of rich Jews secretly rule the world. Though many expressed disappointment and frustration over her tweets, it was largely accepted that her views were her own and to which she was entitled, even if ridiculed…and they probably wouldn’t affect her role on The Mandalorian. Indeed, her fellow actors tweeted general indications of support for her as a person, if not her views.
That appears to have changed with further controversial comments from Carano his week proving to have been the collective last straw.
In some of her recent tweets, which even in the kindest light could be described as ill-advised and massively out of context, she seemed to imply that being a staunch Republican today was like being hunted by the Nazis in World War II: “Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views,” she wrote. (While it’s true that fascists didn’t miraculously appear over night and that street-level xenophobia was a major weapon in an oppressive arsenal the very idea that Nazis weren’t actively responsible for the killings of untold numbers of Jewish people quite obviously, ridiculous and offensive to many and the suggestion that Republicans are being treated the same way is certainly dangerously hyperbolic. Further criticism of people wearing masks in California also continued in other now-deleted posts.
On Wednesday, Lucasfilm made a statement that seems to indicate they had had enough of her collective tweets and that Gina will not be returning to the show.
“Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future. Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable,” they said in a statement.
It is not known whether the recurring character of Cara Dune will be recast or simply not appear in the next run of stories. The rumoured plans for the character to have been part of the spin-off Rangers of the New Republic would also now seem to be in doubt. Carano’s management UTA have also dropped her as a client.
There’s been a lot of bandwidth on the matter, both in support of / feelings against the decision, since Disney+ made the announcement. Some have claimed it is censorship and ‘cancel culture’, others have said that while people have the right to have whatever opinions they want, they shouldn’t automatically be immune from the consequences of their actions. Either way, given Disney+‘s original restraint and reluctance to immediately part ways, this is hardly a ‘knee-jerk‘ reaction.
Whatever your feelings, Senator Ted Cruz seems to have spectacularly missed the point by tweeting: Texan Gina Carano broke barriers in the Star Wars universe: not a princess, not a victim, not some emotionally tortured Jedi. She played a woman who kicked ass & who girls looked up to. She was instrumental in making Star Wars fun again. Of course Disney canceled her.
