Gina Carano Wasn’t Told She Was Fired Off The Mandalorian. She Found Out via Social Media.

Gina Carano reportedly didn’t know she had been fired by Disney / Lucasfilm off of The Mandalorian. She found out via social media like everyone else.

Ouch.

Carano, who played Cara Dune on the popular Disney+ Star Wars series, was terminated after a controversial Instagram post where seemingly compared modern day political “witch hunts” to how the Nazis turned the general public against Jewish people.

Carano made the following comments to journalist Bari Weiss (who herself is no stranger to cancellation attempts) in a recent interview.

“Earlier on last year before The Mandalorian came out, they wanted me to use their exact wording for an apology over pronoun usage. I declined and offered a statement in my own words. I made clear I wanted nothing to do with mocking the transgender community, and was just drawing attention to the abuse of the mob in forcing people to put pronouns in their bio.

That was heart-breaking, but I didn’t want to take away from the hard work of everyone who worked on the project, so I said ok. That was the last time I was contacted about any type of public statement or apology from Lucasfilm. I found out through social media, like everyone else, that I had been fired.

Carano did state that she against bullying, but she was tired of being bullied by Twitter. However, she did not use Lucasfilm’s exact wording and still chastised those who wanted to force her to list her pronouns.

The article notes that Carano was excluded from all press and promotion of The Mandalorian due to her refusal to bend the knee to the social media outrage mob. This would gel with the reports of Cara Dune being removed from official artwork and replaced Ahsoka Tano.

Since Carano’s Instagram post, she’s been labelled by many media outlets as “anti-Semitic.” Lucasfilm PR said she was terminated because her post was “abhorrent.”

It should be noted that many Lucasfilm employees do not use pronouns in their Twitter bios, either, and it does seem likely that Carano was targeted for her outspoken conservative opinions.

Weiss, who is Jewish herself and whose works include How to Fight Anti-Semitism, said that “The bottom line here is that intent matters. It doesn’t just matter a little bit: our entire culture, our entire justice system hinges on it.”

Carano was hired almost immediately by Ben Shapiro, an outspoken Jewish conservative, to helm a new project for The Daily Wire.

Did Disney executives know that Gina Carano was fired?

The multi-million dollar question many are asking is whether or not Disney executives knew about Carano’s termination. It’s highly unlikely that we’ll ever get a clear answer.

It does seem odd, though, that Carano was fired the day before Disney’s Q1 earnings call and it would be a “bad look” to have one of the most popular actors on your most popular Disney+ series “get gone” under such dubious circumstances.

Backlash over Carano’s firing led to the #CancelDisneyPlus hashtag to trend almost immediately on Twitter, and that’s not something the company would have wanted right before presenting numbers for Disney+ to its investors.

Lucasfilm is a magnet for controversy these days.

Carano’s termination is the latest in a long line of social media debacles at Disney-owned Lucasfilm. Just in the past few months, Disney has gotten a PR black eye over Lucasfilm exec Pablo Hidalgo mocking a prominent Star Wars fan YouTuber. Not long after that, Lucasfilm faced backlash over old tweets resurfacing from The High Republic Show’s host Krystina Arielle and the subsequent internet drama that followed.

Disney isn’t the only studio that “fires” people via social media.

Gone seem to be the days of a formal letter or phonecall letting you know you’ve been dropped. Studios like Disney seem to let journalists do their dirty work for them.

Matthew Lillard, longtime voice actor of Shaggy Rogers in Warner Bros.’ Scooby Doo franchise, only found out that he was not reprising his role in Scoob! via the media.

In the comic book industry, it’s sadly very common for people to find out that they’ve been terminated from a book via the media or the Previews solicitations.

Carano is reportedly more popular than ever on Social Media.

According to Newsweek, Gina Carano is actually becoming more popular on social media since her termination. Her follower count has surged more than 300,000 users in a few short days.

It’s possible that Lucasfilm has actually created a conservative martyr, and it’ll be interesting to see if this has any long-term effect on Disney’s bottom line from their conservative customer base.

[Hat Tip: CBN]