Credit: Inside the MagicOn Tuesday, fired The Mandalorian star Gina Carano filed a wrongful discharge and sex discrimination lawsuit against Lucasfilm and The Walt Disney Company. Funded by Elon Musk and X (formerly known as Twitter), she’s seeking legal fees and for Star Wars executives to rescind her 2021 dismissal.
Why now? A Carano supporter might say the former women’s MMA and Muay Thai fighter needed time to build a case. But Carano and Musk first publicly floated the idea of a lawsuit last August, when the Tesla owner promised to pay legal fees for any X user persecuted for using “free speech” on the platform. “I think I qualify,” Carano responded.
Musk didn’t acquire Twitter until 2022, more than a year after Lucasfilm parted ways with Carano. Presumably, the lawsuit is a recent development spurred by Carano’s dwindling on-screen career. Once promised a spinoff of The Mandalorian series on Disney+, Carano has fallen far from her Cara Dune days. She regularly makes appearances at fan conventions but mostly resigned herself to a career as a conservative pundit.
Since 2021, Carano guest starred on Running Wild with Bear Grylls and in Breitbart News’s My Son Hunter (2022), which received almost entirely negative reviews. Shortly after her Lucasfilm firing, the Fast and Furious 6 (2014) actress announced she would produce and star in a thriller called White Knuckles alongside The Daily Wire. Little information about the film’s production is available, and it has no release date.
Carano claims that her Mandalorian co-star, Pedro Pascal, should’ve been fired for comparing migrant children taken from their parents at the southern United States border to those imprisoned, tortured, and murdered during the Holocaust. This argument ignores the many differences between Carano and Pascal’s stories.
Firstly, The Last of Us star was talking about real endangered children, many of whom remain separated from their parents years later. Carano compared being harassed for right-wing opinions online to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. Social media trolls hardly inflict the same pain as forced family separation.
Additionally, Pascal posted one tweet in 2018, while Carano was fired after a series of upsetting statements throughout 2020 and 2021. She insulted the Black Lives Matter movement, made a joke out of preferred pronouns, spread election fraud conspiracy theories, and made fun of COVID-19 masks. Even after her firing, she didn’t learn her lesson, posting an anti-vaccine “Do Not Comply” meme.
Is Carano likely to win? It’s too early to tell. California is an “at-will” employment state, meaning employers can terminate employees at any time for any reason (excluding protected classes). Gender is one of those classes, so the Deadpool (2016) actress will somehow have to prove that Pascal’s 2018 statement was just as “abhorrent and unacceptable” as her many.
It might be a coincidence that Carano didn’t sue United Talent Agency, which also dropped her due to her social media statements in 2021. Or maybe she just wanted to take advantage of the “anti-woke” Disney movement made famous by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and social media influencers like Libs of TikTok. Maybe she needs the publicity.
Will Gina Carano and Elon Musk win their lawsuit against Lucasfilm and The Walt Disney Company? Share your thoughts with Inside the Magic in the comments.