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Gina Carano on Getting Sacked From Star Wars and Her Grudge Match With Disney
The ex-MMA sensation finally opens up about her 'Mandalorian' firing, the toxic tweets that led to it and why she’s tag-teaming with Elon Musk to take the entertainment giant to the mat.
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Back a D23 Expo several years ago they announced a Star Wars show called Rangers of the New Republic. Most people assumed it'd be a Cara Dune show but when Gina Carano became Voldemort online, those people quickly downplayed the show and pretended it didn't exist. But now it's been CONFIRMED that the show was going to star Gina Carano:
For a while, things had appeared to settle down. Carano even fielded a call from Favreau, who said her “life is about to change” with the launch of her own Mandalorian spinoff, Rangers of the New Republic. Citing the pending lawsuit, Favreau declined to comment for this story.
THAT'S why she's suing Disney with Elon Musk. A beta dickwad who wrote for i09 went crying to Lucasfilm and got her fired (this is what actually happened and I'm sure the discovery in the lawsuit will track it down to that). The guy even bragged on Twitter about being the one who did it. He basically spammed Lucasfilm until they gave up and fired her.
She was. But the news of her termination was not relayed directly to her, she says. Instead, she learned of it online along with the rest of the world. “Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future,” read the statement, attributed to a Lucasfilm spokesperson. “Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.” She was dropped by her agency, UTA, and her Hollywood law firm, Ziffren Brittenham. Carano was canceled.
“You become unhirable,” Carano says of her Hollywood banishment. “And then it becomes OK for other people to disrespect you. 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.’ ”
Disney and Lucasfilm watched these controversies unfold with concern. But it was the “boop/bop/beep” incident that launched what she calls a “massive meltdown” behind the scenes. It erupted after Carano, resisting online pressure to announce her pronouns in solidarity with the trans rights movement, put the words “boop/bop/beep” in her Twitter bio. Carano maintains she was never trying to mock the trans community. “I’ve had male publicists with the same size feet as me and we run around in my shoes and try on my dresses,” she says. “I was just fed up. So I was like, ‘Fine, I’ll put something in my bio: ‘boop/bop/beep.’ I thought it was cute, like R2-D2.”
The Lucasfilm and Disney HR department did not find it the least bit cute and subjected Carano to what she describes as a “reeducation camp.” It began with a Zoom meeting with two transgender representatives from GLAAD. “It was a lovely conversation,” Carano says. “They said, ‘Oh, darling, I’m so sorry you stepped on a land mine.’ I listened to them and they listened to me. It was sweet and it was fun, even.” But she says the company also wanted an apology. “You know, one of those statements that almost makes you roll your eyes,” Carano says. HR wanted her publicists to craft it; she offered to write her own. After several days of back-and-forth edits, Lucasfilm ultimately felt the final statement wasn’t contrite enough and abandoned the effort. They then submitted Carano to media training. “She kept her sunglasses on, came into my house and sat all the way across the room,” she recalls of her media trainer. Eventually, Carano coaxed the woman onto the couch “and then we started talking just normally. She said something I found very interesting. She said, ‘It’s not what you say — it’s how it’s interpreted. You’re giving very logical responses to an emotional reaction.’ ”
According to Carano, there were no more media training sessions after that — just, she claims, an order to attend a Zoom meeting along with 45 members of Disney and Lucasfilm’s LGBTQ affinity group, which she says she declined. “I said, ‘Can I take five or six of these trans leaders to dinner? I’ll pay for it,’ ” Carano says. “They denied that. They were very upset. They said the meeting would be a ‘litmus test.’ I’m not even sure what that means.”
Four years later, her career in tatters, Carano can’t believe it all began with something as meaningless as droid sounds. “Boop/bop/beep?” she asks incredulously. “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?”
Disney has until April 9 to respond to the legal petition. So far, the company has issued only a single word regarding the lawsuit — though that word came from the top. When a CNBC journalist asked CEO Bob Iger if he had any comment on the matter, Iger responded, “None.”
There's enough evidence that this was a one-sided witch hunt to really fuck Disney on this. I hope she wins.