Gina Carano, the former MMA fighter turned actor who has played Cara Dune in the first two seasons of Disney+’s Star Wars series The Mandalorian, has been dumped by Lucasfilm after a history of offensive and controversial social media posts. In a statement obtained by Germain Lussier of io9, Lucasfilm announced that Carano “is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future.” The statement goes on to condemn the actor’s recent social posts, stating that it’s “abhorrent and unacceptable” to denigrate others “based on their cultural and religious identities.” The statement was released after the hashtag #FireGinaCarano had trended on Twitter for much of the day.
If you aren’t familiar with Carano’s lengthy list of indefensible tweets and Instagram posts, here’s a quick recap. She’s been accused of transphobia after mocking the use of pronouns in bios. She’s mocked mask mandates during Covid-19 and shared an incoherent post that seems to combine anti-vax sentiment with the conspiracy theories surrounding mail-in voting. She tweeted about election fraud two days after the presidential election in November. She blocked social media accounts that urged her to support Black Lives Matter. In January she liked multiple Twitter posts from supporters of the Capitol riot.
The final straw seems to be an anti-Semitic Instagram story that went up on her account today that equated criticism of conservatives with the violence and discrimination that Jews experienced during the beginnings of the Holocaust. The post was deleted, but enough people saw it—and, importantly, screen-capped it—for the damage to be done. Hours later Lucasfilm released their statement, and by the end of the night Carano had been dropped by her agency UTA, as well, Deadline reported.
Obviously Carano’s beliefs are, as Lucasfilm calls them, abhorrent. It’s shocking that she wasn’t able to keep them inside and stay quiet during the best opportunity she’s had during her acting career. Typically actors make the hard right turn to “woe is me” conservative grievance politics after they can’t get cast in anything, not during the biggest role they’ve ever had. I’m pretty sure Kevin Sorbo wasn’t mouthing off with his conspiracy nonsense until it was already clear he couldn’t get a job anywhere outside of those weird conservative movies he’s always popping up in.
This news puts to rest any possibility of Carano appearing in Rangers of the New Republic, one of three Mandalorian spinoffs announced in December, or in future Mandalorian seasons. It also comes on the same day that her co-star Pedro Pascal, Mando himself, landed a huge role in HBO’s upcoming The Last of Us series. Earlier this week Pascal supported his sister Lux Pascal as she revealed she was trans. So the two Mandalorian stars are on hugely divergent paths right now.