To borrow a phrase, Gina Carano f*cked around and found out. Last week “The Mandalorian” actress was fired from the Lucasfilm TV series after some controversial social media remarks which many found anti-Semitic (she compared the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis as not much different for hating right-wingers for their conservative values, which is an appalling false equivalency and bankrupt victimization). UTA, her agency, dropped her shortly thereafter as well.
The flattened, reductive version from people like the Daily Wire, who subsequently picked her up for a movie deal, was that she was a victim of cancel culture and fired for her political views. But the reality is, Carano had been f*cking around for months on social media and was just begging to find out.
Carano had posted many, many goadingly transphobic comments in the last year, and even by her own admission, Lucasfilm wanted her to apologize for her comments, and she refused (this ought to tell you something: the brass isn’t into these kinds of culturally denigrating comments).
“Earlier on last year before ‘The Mandalorian’ came out, they wanted me to use their exact wording for an apology over pronoun usage,” Carano told conservative, ex-New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss who uses the article to run cover for Carano the entire time. “I declined and offered a statement in my own words. I made clear I wanted nothing to do with mocking the transgender community, and was just drawing attention to the abuse of the mob in forcing people to put pronouns in their bio.”
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Look, if someone can point me to where Carano made a statement in her own words where she “made clear [she] wanted nothing to do with mocking the transgender community,” please, point me to it because as far as I can tell, no statement or even vague apology was ever made.
As a follow-up to Carano’s firing news revealed, a Lucasfilm source told THR, “They have been looking for a reason to fire her for two months, and today was the final straw.” Again, this isn’t because she held conservative values, but she was becoming a huge liability to the show.
In the months leading up to her dismissal from Lucasfilm, Carano had made dozens of controversial, statements; anti-mask and anti-vaccine rhetoric, she amplified false voter fraud claims, posted pro-Nazi, pro-Insurrection imagery and commentary, and had begun to resemble a Qanon-truther and conspiracy theorist.
Weiss says, Lucasfilm’s response was to “exclude her from all press and promotion for the show, according to Carano,” which is demonstrably false and absolute revisionist history, since you can easily google dozens of interviews Carano did about “The Mandalorian,” including her participation in the first introductory press conference to the world, and her participation in the “Disney Gallery: Star Wars: The Mandalorian,” documentary series about the show (guess Weiss no longer fact checks).
Finally, Carano admitted in her short interview with Weiss that she learned of her firing on social media like the rest of the world.
“That was heartbreaking [being excluded from press], but I didn’t want to take away from the hard work of everyone who worked on the project, so I said, ‘ok.’ That was the last time I was contacted about any type of public statement or apology from Lucasfilm. I found out through social media, like everyone else, that I had been fired.”
Though, as an insider recently said to me recently, she was less “fired,” technically, and due to the way TV works, her options for further seasons were just immediately not picked up, thus the line, she is no longer employed. It was also learned recently that Hasbro had canceled her Cara Dune action figures.
Let’s not forget that THR revealed that Lucasfilm wanted to make a spin-off show with Carano’s Cara Dune as one of the leads, but backed away from that idea after some further social media controversies in November. Could they have been any more explicit to her in that message, and she still decided to prod and provoke? No matter your political allegiance, you can probably agree that’s quite obviously a bear telling you you shouldn’t poke it any further.
