The Dallas native, a mixed martial arts fighter turned film and TV star, seemed to be on the rise to stardom, winning roles such as evil Angel Dust in the first Deadpool film and the former rebel shock trooper Cara Dune in the Disney+ Star Wars series The Mandalorian. Then Carano lost her part on perhaps the biggest show on television at the time — and the most lucrative sci-fi franchise in Hollywood history — by tweeting out a Molotov cocktail of political opinions mixed with Nazi references.
Carano's posts on social media started laying out the path for a rocky career in 2020, when she seemed to be tumbling down a rabbit hole of anti-trans and anti-mask sounding sentiments. She changed her pronouns on Twitter to read "boop/bop/beep" in contrast with Mandalorian co-star Pedro Pascal's "he/him" pronouns on his profile. Pascal has a transgender sister who came out the preceding February. Then the following November, three days after the 2020 presidential election, Carano posted a call to action for support of stricter voter fraud laws because, "We need to clean up the election process so we are not left feeling the way we do today."
Later that month, she tweeted that people should "open up your businesses & churches" because "you're telling me COVID-19 knows the difference between a protest or praise & worship" along with some pretty clear anti-mask mandates targeting "Democratic government leaders," which are still up on her page.
— Gina Carano 🕯 (@ginacarano) November 15, 2020The final straw for Disney and Lucasfilm happened in February 2021 when Carano posted a story on her Instagram that used an analogy about how "hating someone for their political views" is akin to the hatred stirred up by Nazis during the days leading up to the Holocaust. The Instagram story also included a photo of a running woman screaming in terror as she's chased by children carrying clubs, taken during the 1941 Pogrom in Lvov in which Ukrainian mobs led a bloody campaign of violence against Jewish men and women in the streets of western Ukraine following Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union.
The story eventually came down from Carano's Twitter, but users across all social media channels made sure it didn't leave the web and even started a #FireGinaCarano campaign against the former athlete and actress. Lucasfilm announced in a statement that Carano would no longer be part of any future episodes of The Mandalorian nor in the Star Wars franchise due to "her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities," which they called "abhorrent and unacceptable."
The United Talent Agency also dropped her as a client, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Carano responded a day after her firing by releasing a statement to Deadline Hollywood announcing a new partnership with the right-leaning news and media studio The Daily Wire, founded by conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, with a new Western thriller called Terror on the Prairie set for release sometime later this year to Daily Wire subscribers. The film is also being produced by Dallas Somnier, the founder of the Dallas-based Bonfire Legend (formerly Cinestate) studio, which produced The Daily Wire's first online film Run. Hide. Fight. Carano did not directly address the comments she made on her Instagram in her statement but later denied in an interview with Shapiro on The Daily Wire's website that she was trying to compare modern day conservatives to victims of Nazi occupation.
Screenshot by @eternalsansa
The convention released the announcement on Twitter, and it didn't take long for the replies to start flying.
The feed of replies on Twitter also included a healthy dose of positive responses from supporters, although some were a little more awkward than others. One of Carano's past defenders was Sen. Ted Cruz, who publicly supported Carano with a tweet in which he proved how little he knew about Star Wars and the Holocaust.
The Observer sent emails to representatives of Carano and Fan Expo Dallas but we haven't heard back.
hot stuff. she deserved better than the woke gestapo treatment. (and yes, I'm intentionally invoking the irony in that choice of term)
— Felix921 (@Feelix921) March 24, 2022
