Disney ceases working with Gina Carano after “abhorrent and unacceptable” social media posts

Photo: Jean Baptiste Lacroix (Getty Images)

Disney has issued a statement tonight, making it clear that actress Gina Carano, who played the character of Cara Dune in the first two seasons of its Star Wars streaming series The Mandalorian, is not currently employed by the company, and that there are no plans to bring her back. Furthermore, the company—per our colleagues at io9—made clear that it condemns recent statements made on social media by the MMA star, stating that “her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

And it might give you some idea of why the #FireGinaCarano hashtag has been circulating for months now on Twitter that it actually takes a bit of investigation to pinpoint which of Carano’s applicable social media posts Disney was referring to here. Presumably, it was related to a since-deleted Instagram post in which Carano shared rhetoric comparing modern-day treatment of political opponents online (insults, occasional bannings) to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany (actual, non-metaphorical murder on a soul-crushingly industrial scale), a point of view that earned points with pretty much nobody in terms of the sympathy it was presumably meant to elicit.

But, really, it’s been a grab bag of shit for months now: Carano has drawn ire for statements mocking the use of pronouns in bios, statements denying the severity of COVID-19, statements raising the bullshit specter of voter fraud in the 2020 election, and more. Given her importance to its current Star Wars plans—including an expected role in the upcoming Rangers Of The New Republic Disney+ series—the company was presumably hoping she’d manage to stop the Tweeting Disease before it reached the terminal stage, but that appears to have been mere wishful thinking. Ironically, Carano has yet to tweet about this; her most recent posts include an announcement that she was going on the Babylon Bee podcast, a “Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself” meme, and an endorsement of The Truman Show. The career might be in trouble, but the brand is still going strong.