Cara-no-no —
Report claims that pressure had mounted for months: “Today was the final straw.”
Sam Machkovech
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Aurich Lawson / Lucasfilm
Gina Carano’s turbulent tenure as a member of the Star Wars acting universe has come to an abrupt end.
Lucasfilm issued a statement to the press on Wednesday, which Ars first found on io9, confirming that Carano was out of not just The Mandalorian, on which she co-starred for two seasons, but all Star Wars properties. It read:
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.
The phrasing implies that Carano’s relationship with Disney and Lucasfilm may have ended before her most recent high-profile post on social media: an Instagram “story” quoting an anti-mask podcast’s post that compared Nazi “rounding up” of Jews during the Holocaust to “hating someone for their political views.” The same post, from this Tuesday evening, implied that Jews were somehow more subject to violence by “neighbors” than by Nazis—without citing a nation, era, or other clarification about the point being made.
The Hollywood Reporter quoted “a source with knowledge of Lucasfilm’s thinking,” who said that Lucasfilm and Disney execs had been “looking for a reason to fire [Carano] for two months, and today was the final straw.” In recent months, the former MMA athlete and Fast & Furious actor had doubled-down on anti-mask messaging and casting doubt on the presidential election. As it turns out, according to THR’s “sources,” these November posts moved Disney to pivot from its previous plans of announcing Carano as the star of her own Disney+ TV series. (This Carano-series news had previously not been reported until today.)
Her history with social media controversy went back further than November, however. In August, Carano posted a picture of Nazi soldiers in a crowd, with a single non-saluting person circled and not otherwise captioned. She followed this in September with a change in her social media profile to read “Beep/bop/boop”—an apparent response to fans asking her to list pronouns as an act of allyship with the trans community. Carano spent Wednesday doubling-down on this reputation for controversial social media messaging, going so far as to post a take on the “Epstein didn’t kill himself” meme, among other posts.
Carano or no, Disney+ appears to have no shortage of new Star Wars-related content to lean on for the foreseeable future, between an Obi-Wan series starring Ewan McGregor and three Mandalorian-related series.