Gina Carano has gone from fighting on behalf of Baby Yoda to fighting alongside conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.
One day after Lucasfilm said her controversial social media posts were “abhorrent and unacceptable,” making The Mandalorian actress unwelcome in future Star Wars projects, she has announced a filmmaking deal with Shapiro and the conservative website The Daily Wire.
“The Daily Wire is helping make one of my dreams — to develop and produce my own film — come true,” Carano said Friday in a statement released exclusively to Andreas Wiseman of the Hollywood trade outlet Deadline. “I cried out and my prayer was answered. I am sending out a direct message of hope to everyone living in fear of cancellation by the totalitarian mob. I have only just begun using my voice which is now freer than ever before, and I hope it inspires others to do the same. They can’t cancel us if we don’t let them.”
The split between Lucasfilm and Carano, a former MMA fighter who has appeared in the films Haywire and Deadpool, came after months of contentious back and forth on social media between the actress and fans who were outraged by a series of remarks, including her mockery of transgender-sensitive pronouns, unfounded suggestions of fraud during the presidential election, and ridicule of mask-wearing protocols during the pandemic. The final straw was a since-deleted Instagram post in which she compared heated political disagreements in the present-day United States to the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust, using a picture of a half-clothed, screaming woman being assaulted during the German massacres in Lviv, Poland, in 1941.
According to the Deadline report, Carano’s next film project will be released exclusively to subscribers to The Daily Wire, which has been trying to break into original entertainment content. Shapiro, co-founder of the right-wing publication, released a statement that chided Carano’s former employers. “We could not be more excited to be working with Gina Carano, an incredible talent dumped by Disney and Lucasfilm for offending the authoritarian Hollywood Left. This is what Daily Wire exists to do: provide an alternative not just for consumers, but for creators who refuse to bow to the mob.”
Shapiro added that he intended to “show Hollywood that if they want to keep cancelling those who think differently, they’ll just be helping us build the X-wing to take down their Death Star.”
In 2018, Vanity Fair‘s Tina Nguyen explored how “Shapiro has made owning the libs a lucrative business,” helped in part by a Hollywood makeover.
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