Gina Carano is opening up about the difficult days immediately after she was fired from The Mandalorian in a new profile.
The mixed martial artist–turned–actress revealed in a new Hollywood Reporter profile how betrayed she felt by her former employee Disney after the entertainment giant fired her in February 2021.
The 41-year-old Haywire star revealed that she ‘cried and cried’ in the wake of her firing, which came after she posted an offensive Instagram image widely interpreted as comparing modern-day Republicans to persecuted Jews in the midst of the Holocaust.
It was the final straw in the wake of social media posts espousing anti-vaccine and anti-mask views while criticism Covid safety measures, along with posts supporting former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims disputing the results of the 2020 election — though she claims she’s not an ‘election denier’ — and statements critical of the Black Lives Matter movement and transgender rights.
DailyMail.com has reached out to Carano’s representative for comment.
Carano is now taking aim at Disney and Lucasfilm with a lawsuit that is being bankrolled by Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), where many of Carano’s controversial posts originated.
Gina Carano, 41, spoke about the aftermath of her firing from Disney’s Star Wars series The Mandalorian in a Hollywood Reporter profile published Thursday; seen in 2019 in Hollywood
She was fired from The Mandalorian after making controversial anti-vax, anti-mask, anti-Black Lives and anti-transgender rights posts, with a post comparing Republicans to Jews under assault during the Holocaust being the final straw; still from The Mandalorian
After Carano went too far with her Holocaust-referencing social post, a campaign to ‘#FireGinaCarano’ spread on social media before Disney decided to give her the boot.
‘Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future,’ a statement from a Lucasfilm spokesperson read. ‘Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable’
Carano claims that the statement was put out publicly before anyone from Disney or Lucasfilm bothered to tell her that she was fired from the high-profile Star Wars series.
It wasn’t just Disney cutting ties. Her talent agency UTA also dropped her as a client, and Ziffren Brittenham, the Hollywood law firm at which she was a client, stopped representing her.
‘I just laid down and cried and cried,’ she recalled of the period. ‘I curled into a fetal position.
‘It’s not that I didn’t think that something like that could happen,’ she claimed. ‘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 then sold her home in Hermosa Beach and then moved into an RV.
She claimed Disney fired her without telling her first, and she then met with the right-wing news company The Daily Wire to set up a low-budget Western film, Terror On The Praire; still from The Mandalorian
Elon Musk is now funding a discrimination and wrongful termination lawsuit she filed against Disney and Lucasfilm; seen in December in Rome
After a three-week trek across the US interior, she arrived in Nashville, Tennessee, where she took a meeting with the right-wing media company The Daily Wire, which was founded by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing.
The conservative news site has lately expanded into putting out low-budget movies that appeal to its audience’s politics.
Her first effort for the new studio was the Western film Terror On The Prairie, which was sent out to subscribers.
She followed that up with a more explicitly right-wing film, My Son Hunter, a fictional comedy directed by Robert Davi built on right-wing conspiracy theories about President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who will go on trial later this year on federal gun charges.
Carano mostly kept a low-profile after those two small films came and went without much impact, until she launched a surprise lawsuit against Disney and Lucasfilm, alleging discrimination and wrongful termination.
X owner Elon Musk even agreed to fund the lawsuit against the deep-pocketed entertainment giant.
In August 2023, he had tweeted” ‘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 claimed to have never directly communicated with Musk — who was revealed this month to have had a meeting with former President Donald Trump in Florida — but she praised him for sticking up for her.
‘I think it’s pretty incredible what he is doing,’ she said. ‘A lot of billionaires put their money into buying islands and building bunkers. Elon Musk is using his money to fight massive injustice battles.’
Carano said Disney gave her training after controversial statements about transgender people that was like a ‘reeducation camp,’ and she refused a Zoom call with Disney 45-member LGBTQ affinity group, which apparently angered the company
Elsewhere in the profile, Carano describes the training Disney put her through for her posting nonsense pronouns in her Twitter bio — ‘beep/bop/boop’ — calling it a ‘reeducation camp,’ though she described a chat with two transgender GLAAD representatives as ‘sweet and fun.’
She said the company also wanted her to apologize, preferably with a statement written by her publicists to avoid striking up more controversy.
But she refused and instead drafted a statement of her own, but after multiple edits, Disney allegedly scrapped it after determining that it was not apologetic enough.
Carano said she then received a single media trainer session, but she appeared to infuriate Disney again after refusing to attend a Zoom meeting with 45 members of Disney LGBTQ affinity group.
‘I said, “Can I take five or six of these trans leaders to dinner? I’ll pay for it,”‘ she claimed. ‘They denied that. They were very upset. They said the meeting would be a “litmus test.” I’m not even sure what that means.’
Despite her firing and her statements about trans people, Carano said she still had a solid relationship with The Mandalorian’s star Pedro Pascal.
The Game Of Thrones actor, who has a transgender sister, had previously spoken with her one-on-one about transgender issues during her pronouns controversy, though she refused his alleged suggestion to ‘Just put #transrights in your feed.’
‘Me and Pedro were so close,’ she said. ‘He knows 1,000 percent I’m not homophobic or transphobic.
She said her former costar messaged her shortly after the death of their costar Carl Weathers.
‘We had our conversation and it was beautiful. One thing he did say was, “Thank you. You and Carl Weathers have always been protectors,”‘ she claimed. ‘And he knows what that means, and I know what that means, and I wish I could tell why. We basically left it at “I can’t wait to give you a big hug.”‘
The profile notes that Disney was rumored to be planning to replace Carano even before her controversial holocaust-referencing tweet, which could allow Disney to dispute the circumstances of her firing if its supported by evidence.
‘I said, “Can I take five or six of these trans leaders to dinner? I’ll pay for it,”‘ she claimed. ‘They denied that. They were very upset. They said the meeting would be a “litmus test.” I’m not even sure what that means’; still from Haywire
The profile referenced a tweet from a Lucasfilm artist who said they were ordered to airbrush an image of Carano’s character and replace her with Rosario Dawson’s character from the Disney–Star Wars series Ahsoka.
Carano went on to defend the tweet that got her fired, which features a photo of a Jewish woman being chased by youths with baseball bats in Nazi Germany.
She said that the Holocaust meme ‘just made sense,’ and her takeaway from it was ‘don’t hate your neighbor.’
‘Before the Nazis were as powerful as they became, you had to make it OK to hate this person next to you. That’s how we get to dangerous places. And history does repeat itself,’ she said.
The publication quoted the Anti-Defamation League’s statement about Carano’s tweet.
‘Such comparisons are generally not indications of antisemitic animus; however, they are often used to further a political agenda,’ the organization determined. ‘Such references are outrageous and may be profoundly hurtful to Jews, many of whom lost family members or carry memories of the trauma.’
Carano later revealed in the piece that she had moved to Montana after following in love with its wide-open landscapes while filming Terror On The Prairie.
She was open to a return to mainstream Hollywood productions, but suggested it was unlikely.
‘If the unforgivable sin in Hollywood is being a person who wouldn’t perfectly conform at a time when emotions were running wild in the world, then that’s probably not a Hollywood I’ll ever belong to,’ she said.
Carano also expressed some interest in giving fighting another chance.
‘I think once you’re a fighter, you always feel like you’re going to be a fighter for the rest of your life. I think I’ll be like 80 and shadowboxing down in my garage, thinking, “I’ll have that comeback one day,”‘ she joked.
Carano claimed her Mandalorian costar Pedro Pascal reached out to her after their costar Carl Weathers (center) died. She claimed it was a cordial conversation; still from The Mandalorian
Since she was fired, Carano has moved to Montana. She said she’s focused on ‘clearing my name’ with her lawsuit, as opposed to getting a big payday
She concluded by weighing in on her ‘cancellation’ and what she hopes to win if her lawsuit is victorious.
‘You won’t find a perfect person in me, but you will find a person who was doing her absolute best under one of the most aggressive unnecessary cancellations in Hollywood history,’ she claimed. ‘This has been one of the toughest growth spurts of my life and I don’t plan on wasting what I have learned.’
She also claimed she wasn’t thinking about financial gain from her lawsuit.
‘I’m thinking about clearing my name. I’m thinking about finally being healthier and having this monkey off my back and telling my story and just getting on with my life. Finally,’ she said.
