Gina Carano, who played Cara Dune in the first two seasons of Disney+ show The Mandalorian, was fired due to anti-Semitic comments made on TikTok, though she has been quite vocal about her controversial views on social media for quite some time.
Lucasfilm, the Walt Disney co-owned movie studio, said on Wednesday that it had ditched Gina Carano, a lead actor in its TV series, over social media posts. The comments in question were made on a now-deleted TikTok post that compared the current politically charged climate to Nazi Germany. “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?” wrote Carano.
That seemed to be the last straw for Lucasfilm, who released a statement last night saying, “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.”
In another post, Carano shared a photo of a person wearing multiple cloth masks with the caption, “Meanwhile in California…”
Both posts were gone from Carano’s Instagram by mid-day Wednesday. Other posts, including one in which Carano wrote, “Jeff Epstein didn’t kill himself”, remained.
The former MMA fighter, Carano has also been dropped as a client by UTA, an agency spokesperson confirms. Gina Carano will not be returning to The Star Wars Galaxy after sharing a post on social media that implied being a Republican today is like being Jewish during the Holocaust.
Carano was dropped by her publicists at ID in fall of 2020 due to her social media activity which has included statements about facemask wearing and voter fraud. She had been with the PR firm briefly.
But her most offensive post yet is the one which Carano reshared to her Instagram story. It was a photo of a Jewish woman in her undergarments screaming as she ran away from men and young boys armed with clubs. The famed image is from 1941 during the Lviv pogroms, where Jewish men and women were massacred by their own neighbors in modern-day Ukraine due to German influence in the area.
The hashtag #FireGinaCarano began trending, with those on social media tagging The Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau, Disney, Disney+, Star Wars and Lucasfilm. Carano and her supporters attempted to get the hashtag #weloveginacarano to trend, but to little effect.
There were no plans to use Cara Dune in season three of The Mandalorian, but there were plans to use the character elsewhere, as it was recently revealed she was set to get her own spinoff, which was supposed to be announced at last December’s Disney Investor Day presentation. Those plans were scrapped after her previous social media controversies.
While never confirmed, it was expected that she would also play some sort of role in The Rangers of the New Republic spinoff that was announced, but if that was the case, those plans were scrapped too. The popular Star Wars franchise had just finished season two and Carano’s character Cara Dune seemed poised for a return in some form. She had reportedly recently apologized in private to Disney for her posts in hopes that she could land her own spinoff series.
Some have called for Disney to just recast the character instead of letting everything associated with Dune go, as she had quickly become a fan favorite after her debut in season one. That might be the best way to salvage the character because it would anyway be a waste to just never see her again and let the character fade.
