One of The Mandalorian’s breakout stars will no longer be a part of the show.
Gina Carano, who plays Cara Dune on the series, a bounty hunter who often teams up with the titular character, was let go Wednesday night. Lucasfilm, which produces the hit for Disney+, released a statement on the matter, pointing to the actor’s social media posts.
“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,” a spokesperson from Lucasfilm said in a statement.
The former MMA star was then dropped from her talent agency UTA.
The move comes after #FireGinaCarano began trending on various social media channels after an Instagram story she had posted, which has since been deleted, was broadly condemned online, in which the actor included text that compared being a conservative in America to being a Jewish person during the Holocaust.
Carano has long been outspoken on her political stances, mocking mask-wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic and suggesting voter fraud occurred during the 2020 election, a widely debunked claim.
A source told The Hollywood Reporter that this did not happen overnight, and Lucasfilm has been “looking for a reason to fire her for two months,” with this latest post being the final straw.
did she just compare the holocaust to being a republican .. #FireGinaCarano pic.twitter.com/an3css7Kdr
— janet (@djarinculture) February 10, 2021
Carano was also reportedly going to get her own Disney+ spinoff series that followed her character, the former Rebel Alliance soldier, which was initially going to be announced last December, but the actor’s posts halted the move.
Carano has had a unique rise to stardom, once ranked as one of the top women’s MMA fighters and most influential women in the world in the late 2000s before transitioning to acting, landing roles in Fast & Furious 6 (2013) and Deadpool (2016), all buoyed by her starring role in the Steven Soderbergh action film Haywire in 2011.
Her role as Dune was her biggest yet, as The Mandalorian, which is set in the Star Wars universe after the events of 1983’s Return of the Jedi, quickly became one of the most talked about shows in the world at the end of 2019, causing a huge spike in subscribers for Disney+ and making the fledgling streaming service an early success. The series streams exclusively in the Middle East on OSN.
Esquire now has a newsletter – sign up to get it sent straight to your inbox.
Want up-to-the-minute entertainment news and features? Just hit ‘Like’ on our Esquire Facebook page and ‘Follow’ on our @esquiremiddleeast Instagram and Twitter account.
