Gina Carano talks Pedro Pascal, decision to “go down swinging”

Earlier this month, Disney fired The Mandalorian star Gina Carano (Cara Dune) after months of blowback over things she had said online. “[H]er social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable,” the studio said in a statement.

The blowback began in September of last year, when Carano mocked the practice of pronoun sharing online. According to Carano, who gave an interview to Bari Weiss not long after her firing, Disney asked her to read an apology they had prepared, but she refused. A couple months later, she followed that up with a tweet mocking the practice of wearing masks during the pandemic, and then one peddling the false claims made by President Trump that the 2020 election had been fraudulent.

Then, on February 10, came what one source at The Hollywood Reporter called “the last straw” for Disney: Carano posted a message equating the criticism directed at modern day conservations to what Jewish people suffered during the Holocaust in Germany under Adolf Hitler.

Since then, Carano has signed a deal to appear in a movie distributed by The Daily Wire, a conservative website edited by pundit Ben Shapiro. She also appeared on Shapiro’s show, where she gave her thought on what happened over the past couple of weeks.

Carano said that she felt increased scrutiny on the set of The Mandalorian after the scandal started. “They’ve been all over me and they’ve been watching me like a hawk. And I’m watching people on the same production and they can say everything they want, and that’s where I had a problem. I had a problem because I wasn’t going along with the narrative.”

"I was prepared at any point to be let go because I’ve seen this happen to so many people. I’ve seen the looks on their faces. I’ve seen the bullying that takes place, and so when this started, they point their guns at you, and you know it’s only a matter of time. I’ve seen it happen to so many people, and I just thought to myself, ‘you’re coming for me, I know you are.’ They’re making it very obvious through their employees who were coming for me, and so I was like, ‘I’m going to go down swinging and I’m going to stay true to myself.’"

She doesn’t give an exact timeline here, but I’m guessing that the scrutiny started after she refused to release Disney’s apology, and that she kicked off the era of staying true to herself with the anti-mask tweet.

Gina Carano compares her tweets to her Mandalorian costar Pedro Pascal’s

Carano also talked about Mandalorian costar Pedro Pascal (after the initial blowback began, she credited him with helping her better understand the practice of pronoun sharing). In the wake of her firing, some fans have called for Disney to fire Pascal as well, on account of a 2018 tweet where he compared the caging of Jewish children during the Holocaust to the caging of migrant children at the United States-Mexico border.

“I adore Pedro. I adore him. I know he’s said and done some hurtful things. I don’t think posting anybody’s number on social media is okay,” she said, referring to a January tweet where Pascal shared the publicly available office number for Senator Ted Cruz. “But we had an agreement after we realized we were a little bit politically different. We had an agreement that, first and foremost, you’re a human being. And you’re my friend first.”

"That’s what’s been really crazy. You see these people [on one side] being so passionate and you see people [on the opposing side] being so passionate. I just love that we’re both passionate. We think a little bit differently, I think, through our different experiences. I know that we both have misstepped on our tweets. We’re not perfect. We’re human beings. But he’s not a bad human being. He’s a sweet person."

Yeah, I can’t agree with the equivocation between the tweets here — “We both have misstepped on our tweets.” There’s nothing wrong with Pascal or anyone else sharing the number to a front-facing office of an elected official charged with representing the people of the United States. And while Pascal’s own Holocaust tweet used shocking imagery, it’s still equating one image of a government putting children in cages with another. It’s a far cry from equating an angry Twitter mob with the Third Reich.

Still, it’s rarely a good move to invoke the Holocaust, something Carano herself admits when talking about her conservatives-are-persecuted-like-the-Jews-under-Nazism message. “I’ve actually grown through the experience of just knowing that it’s not fair to the Jewish community to just throw this out here so much,” she told Ben Shapiro, who is Jewish. “When you say the world ‘Nazi’ and you call someone a Nazi, you need to have a little more respect on it.”

Still, she defended her original tweet, saying she believed at the time that it “would be more of a thing that would bring people together.”

That one’s hard to parse together in my head. So Carano is being criticized online and watched by Disney, thinks that’s comparable to what the Jews suffered during the Holocaust, and believes that saying so will bring people together rather than inflame them…that’s a tricky logic train to board.

More on this exhausting story as it develops…or not. Maybe it could just not.

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h/t Entertainment Weekly