Gina Carano has had a rough couple of years since her unceremonious sacking from Disney’s The Mandalorian. The MMA fighter turned-actress might have stayed busy with critical and box office failures like Terror on the Prairie (it’s one-day theatre run made a pathetic $804), but her latest stunt with billionaire Elon Musk indicates she wants back into the “woke mobs” good graces.
If you’re unfamiliar with what landed Carano in hot water, to begin with, we’ve compiled the list of faux pas that landed her on Hollywood’s “No Fly” list. Spoiler alert, it was more than a year of divisive Tweets. We know the pandemic was hard for us all, but it’s hard to feel much sympathy for this very public breakdown.
What did Gina Carano say?
Gina Carano’s career was looking pretty sweet at the beginning of 2020. The actress wowed Star Wars fans with her portrayal of special forces operative Cara Dune in The Mandalorian’s first season, and Disney had big plans for the character. Not only was she set to star in The Rangers of the New Republic, but Disney Plus’s focus on weaving the extended universe into a cohesive project meant she had movies and television appearances lined up for the next decade. Despite all of her success, Carano couldn’t stop herself from sharing whatever thought popped into her head on social media.
Her controversial online presence gained traction in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The actress was a vocal opponent of mask mandates. Her Instagram and Twitter posts were mostly stupid memes but people were dying – 350k Americans died of the disease in 2020 alone.
Many right-wing talking heads flouted safety procedures and declared mask mandates violations of free speech –The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in February 2024 that medical mandates don’t fall under the protection of the 1st Amendment – and Carano pushed the narrative. A vocal Republican, she frequently used her platform to espouse her political ideals, from endorsing the voter fraud conspiracy around the 2020 election, to conspiracy theories around Jeffrey Epstein’s death.
Carano found herself in hot water after starting beef over the Black Lives Matter movement on Twitter. The fight was sparked by a commenter telling Carano that protestors were “trying to educate you so you can get on the right side of history,” according to the New York Post. Carano responded,
“In my experience, screaming at someone that they are a racist when they are indeed NOT a racist & any post and/or research you do will show you those exact facts, then I’m sorry, these people are not ‘educators.’ They are cowards and bullies.”
Despite ample warning and, by her own admission, Disney repeatedly requiring her to “review documentaries on any of these topics or speak to individuals with contrary points of view,” Carano continued to dig herself a hole. She refused to use pronouns in her Twitter bio, and while that rankled fan, the breaking point came when she addressed the issue by adding “beep/boop/boop” to her profile in response. The hashtag #FireGinaCarano had been liberally used by the social media site in the wake of her habitual sh*t-posting, but it took off in the wake of her “protest.”
We’re all for expressing yourself, but not to the detriment of roughly 1% of the population. As a former MMA fighter, you’d think Carano would understand the concept of punching down. Instead, when she was pushed on social media, she responded by doubling down.
The Mandalorian star Pedro Pascal has never publicly addressed the controversy, but Carano did say that when Pascal’s sister Lux came out as a trans woman, the actor pulled her aside to talk about her hurtful actions. In a since-deleted Tweet Carano said,
“I didn’t know before but I do now. I won’t be putting them in my bio but good for all you who choose to. I stand against bullying, especially the most vulnerable & freedom to choose.”
The actress told Ben Shapiro that she knew Disney officials were paying attention to her online behavior after #FireGinaCarano started trending on Twitter. Though she says there were plenty of people who had her back, it wasn’t enough. She whined that other people, like Pascal could say whatever they liked on social media. She went so far as to use him as an example in her recent lawsuit, alluding to a post in which he compared immigrant children in cages to Nazi concentration camps as a comparison for her own Nazi-centric post. In her lawsuit she blames the disconnect on his gender identity.
That’s right, Pascal can’t play the race card, but Carano can sure as heck lean on her womanhood.
Carano claimed that Disney was watching her like a hawk, and yet, it didn’t stop her from putting the final nail in her coffin.
The straw that broke the Bantha’s back
The death rattle of Carano’s career came after the actress compared her life as a Republican to the plight of Jews during the Holocaust. Sharing an image of Nazi Germany, Carano said,
“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…. even by children,” to hammer the message home she punctuated it with a sad face emoji before continuing. “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.”
The post was deleted days later, alongside several anti-mask posts. After months of warnings and second chances, Disney canned Carano.
Gina Carano’s statement explained
Since her firing, Carano has tried working for right-wing production companies, but it seems the move isn’t working out for her. The actress is currently gearing up to take on the House of Mouse with a lawsuit alleging the company discriminated against her for her political beliefs. Carano has X owner Elon Musk backing her lawsuit.
Within her recent Tweet about her intent to sue, Carano tells people to “look with their own eyes” to see where she compared Republicans to Jewish people in the Holocaust. She asks why people would call her a racist, or a transphobe for, “making droid noises from Star Wars? “Beep, bop, boop” was obviously directed to the online bullies and did not in any way denigrate transgender people.”
It’s easy to disagree with Carano on those points (the internet’s memory is long) but some of the other areas are less clear. She says that her gender and political ideologies are at the heart of this case, and that her male co-stars were never “re-educated.” She also leans on the idea that her right to free speech was some how infringed upon. We’d like to gently remind Carano that, while you have the right to say whatever you want, there are consequences to every action.
If the actress manages to win the suit, Disney will owe her $75,000 and will be forced to add Carano back to the Star Wars roster.