Gina Carano on Lucasfilm firing: ‘I found out through social media’

There are new updates on the Gina Carano firing story from last week. Late Wednesday night, after #FireGinaCarano had been trending on Twitter for most of the day (and previous times before that), Lucasfilm announced that the Cara Dune actress was no longer employed with the company.

Now, Carano is speaking out about the news, talking to journalist Bari Weiss in a new feature story. The actress was caught in a chain of events that led to her eventual firing. And now she’s revealing just how she learned about the news from her former employer.

As she told Weiss in the interview, “I found out through social media, like everyone else, that I had been fired.”  She revealed the information as she was talking about a prior mishap where Lucasfilm encouraged her to release an apology following statements made on Twitter about pronoun usage. Carano revealed that when she decided not to go with Lucasfilm’s wording and sent a response in her own words, she was then, essentially, demoted by not being involved in major press and promotion for The Mandalorian season 2. She said in the article:

"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."

On top of being booted from the show, there has been some other fallout news and announcements surrounding her character. According to anonymous sources from The Hollywood Reporter, Carano was supposed to get her own spinoff series — and that series was going to be announced at the large Disney Investor Day presentation in December until the pronouns scandal broke out.

“They have been looking for a reason to fire her for two months, and today was the final straw,” the source said to THR.

In addition to that, Hasbro revealed that they would no longer be creating The Mandalorian figures based on Cara Dune. Here’s what THR published about Hasbro in a separate story on Monday:

"“The Star Wars Black Cara Dune figure was released in 2020 and sold out not long after the inventory was received,” a spokeswoman for BigBadToyStore told THR in a Monday email. “Hasbro planned for another production run and we were accepting preorders from that production run. Due to recent events, Hasbro was no longer approved to produce any more of this figure.”"

If there’s one person who has been in her corner through all of this, it’s the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, who revealed last week that the two would be teaming up on a new movie.

Shapiro shared an additional statement in the Weiss story regarding the controversial meme that Carano shared, saying: “This doesn’t chart. I don’t like the meme, especially given its origins. But antisemitism, like racism — and contrary to the NYT’s executive editor’s dictum — requires intent. Gina obviously didn’t have any such intent.”