Gina Carano, Cara Dune in The Mandalorian, has spoken to the Hollywood Reporter about being fired from the Disney+ flagship series, and why she’s tag-teaming with Elon Musk to sue Disney for discrimination and wrongful termination.
The final straw came with a meme she stumbled across and reposted to Instagram Stories and to Fleets (Twitter’s version of Stories) on Feb. 10, 2021. It featured a photo of a terrified Jewish woman being chased by a boy holding a bat during the Holocaust. “How is this any different from hating someone for their political views?” the accompanying caption asked. The posts were widely circulated, launching a Twitter hashtag campaign — #FireGinaCarano.
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.
“I just laid down and cried and cried,” Carano recalls. “I curled into a fetal position. It’s not that I didn’t think that something like that could happen. It was that I couldn’t imagine they would put out this horrendous statement about me after working with me — the most powerful entertainment company in the world saying that about me.” Carano sold her place in Hermosa Beach and bought an RV. She spent three weeks driving across the country, destination Nashville, where she met with The Daily Wire, the right-wing media company co-founded in 2015 by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing. They hired her to star in and produce a film — a Western from director Michael Polish called Terror on the Prairie, which debuted on the Daily Wire website June 14, 2022. Much mockery was made online of the film grossing only $804 — a number that was seemingly taken from a box office website, which Carano says had mistakenly cited a single theatrical screening where no admission was charged. The plan had always been to distribute the film directly to Daily Wire subscribers.
And that was the last Hollywood had heard of Carano — yet another cautionary casualty of the culture wars. That is, until one month ago, when Carano sued Disney and Lucasfilm for discrimination and wrongful termination. Further raising the profile of that case is the fact that Carano’s legal bills are being footed by X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk — making good on an Aug. 5 post stating, “If you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill. No limit.”
Carano, who has never directly communicated with Musk, views the world’s richest man as her guardian angel. “I think it’s pretty incredible what he is doing,” she says. “A lot of billionaires put their money into buying islands and building bunkers. Elon Musk is using his money to fight massive injustice battles.” Musk, it bears noting, harbors a grudge against Disney, which pulled all advertising from the platform after the mogul voiced support for a conspiracy theory on X that claimed Jews promoted “hatred of whites” and supported bringing “hordes of minorities” into Western nations. During an interview with The New York Times’ DealBook Summit in November, Musk said, “If someone is going to try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself. Hey, Bob [Iger], if you’re in the audience. That’s how I feel, don’t advertise.” Musk and Disney declined to comment for this story.
“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.’ ”
Read the interview in full here, and stream The Mandalorian on Disney+.
