I Watched the Gina Carano/Ben Shapiro Interview So You Don’t Have To
I would like it to be known that I started watching this interview around 11:30 AM EST and the roughly hour-long interview has taken me almost 4 hours to watch in full, mainly because I keep pausing it and screaming about how something isn’t true and then trying to continue on with my anger.
Gina Carano, who was recently let go from Lucasfilm and is no longer playing the role of Cara Dune in the Star Wars universe, sat down with Ben Shapiro to talk about how she went from playing a rebel in the biggest franchise out there to working with Ben “failed screenwriter” Shapiro. The interview is just as frustrating as you’d think, so I watched the entire thing so that you don’t have to!
(Please note that I made sure we were going to publish this before I watched it because I was not willingly watching an hour of this without getting paid for it.)
Carano opened up to Shapiro about her steady decline on social media, starting with her “beep/bop/boop” pronoun fiasco. The star had previously asked about including pronouns in Twitter bios, and when it was explained to her, she decided that it wasn’t for her. When people explained that it was important for cisgender people to use their platforms and normalize the use of pronouns, Carano “fought” back by mockingly posting “beep/bop/boop” as her pronouns.
In the interview with Shapiro, she states that it was to show she could write “anything” in her bio and that it wasn’t against the trans community. The thing is Carano then went on to compare adding “trash panda” to your bio to the importance of pronouns, and that is a problem.
Carano had asked, had her co-star from The Mandalorian Pedro Pascal explain to her why they were important, and still doubled down on doing this despite the fact that she knew why pronouns were important. And then, she played the victim. Carano states that the LGBTQ+ faction of her previous publicist told her that she had “stepped on a landmine” and, apparently, reported back to Disney and Lucasfilm that they shouldn’t “cancel her” because of this.
What’s extremely telling is that Carano says that Disney and Lucasfilm didn’t want her to post the apology that she wrote. Disney, apparently, had a statement that they wanted her to release, and Carano said no and wrote her own. She tells Shapiro that it was a huge thing and showed how she was feeling a year ago.
She believes that they wouldn’t let her post her own statement because Disney thought she was already taking too much spotlight off of The Mandalorian, but the fact that they had a statement for her and she refused to use it, but she wrote her own and they said no? That’s … telling.
Apparently, the statement she wrote wasn’t “apologetic” enough, and the discussion of it in the interview leads into a line of conversation that is beyond frustrating: Carano starts to lie about the GoFundMe that was started by fans to benefit the transgender community.
Started by Maggie Lovitt, Eric Eilersen, and Candace Kaw, the GoFundMe in question was a way of showing the transgender community that we, as Star Wars fans, don’t stand by when people are being harmful. It was simply a way of showing the trans community that we were here for them and was started to benefit the Transgender Law Center. Gina Carano says that it was started by a “creative director” from Lucasfilm and that, in the bio, it says that it was them apologizing for their “ignorant” actress.
I know Maggie Lovitt; we’re friends. Unless she’s secretly working for Lucasfilm and refuses to tell them I want to be in a Star Wars, Carano is lying about her. And when you look at the GoFundMe, it simply states that it was started because of Carano’s ignorance towards the importance of pronouns. Below, you can see that Carano is not even mentioned by name.
“Recently, the hype around the second season of The Mandalorian has been colored by the unfortunate ignorance of one of the major castmates. Their rhetoric has included, amongst other things, the dismissal of pronoun importance – particularly in the trans community.”
Carano goes on to talk about how Lucasfilm wanted her to talk to 40 members of the LGBTQ+ community and she wouldn’t do it because their employees were “slandering her” online. Again, no one who started this fundraiser works for Lucasfilm. But instead of doing Zoom with the employees, Carano offered to take 5 out to lunch in the middle of a pandemic. Like … I’m sorry, what?!
The entire interview is wild (because Carano blames the trans community for the push for respecting pronouns and Ben Shapiro keeps stopping to do sponsored ads) but another part that really infuriates me is her unnecessary call out to Pedro Pascal.
Pedro Pascal is very open about his political views and has been long before he was cast as Din Djarin on The Mandalorian. Pascal is the son of political activists who were granted asylum in Denmark from Chile before the Pascal family moved to the United States. He’s been very open and supportive of the LGBTQ+ community and is not one to shy away from calling out politicians online.
Carano pointed out that he posted Ted Cruz’s phone number on Twitter and said it wasn’t okay. I’m sorry, but posting the public number to Ted Cruz’s office when Cruz was still supporting Donald Trump and those who stormed the Capitol Building is not a bad thing. Ted Cruz works for the people of America. He ran for public office. The number Pascal shared was to Cruz’s office. It’s all public information.
But what really infuriated me is that she said that she adores Pascal. She shared her support of him and shared that the two tried not to let politics get between them. That’s all fine, but then why did you let Ben Shapiro bring him up in an interview about you? He has nothing to do with you and your social media posts or your firing. He’s your coworker and friend, not the one who was responsible for you, and he wasn’t responsible for Disney’s actions towards you. Friends shouldn’t randomly bring up someone else to distract from their own mistakes.
The rest of the interview is more of the same, talking about her career and how she got there and how she’s not a bully and hates bullies, and the entire thing ends with Ben Shapiro asking her what movie they want to make together since that’s a thing that’s happening. Love to “be canceled” and get a movie deal out of it!
There are some questions that Ben Shapiro asked Gina Carano that I will never see because I’m not spending money to access anything he does. I don’t care.
But this entire interview drives home one very clear truth: Facts don’t care about your feelings, but Ben Shapiro (and Gina Carano) don’t care about facts. Not two minutes into this interview and I already had noted quite a few lies or exaggerations, all to make Shapiro and Carano look better.
After the interview, Carano took to social media to say “Welcome to the rebellion,” and it is also part of the marketing for this episode of Shapiro’s show. The fact that Gina Carano has adopted the phrase “welcome to the rebellion” is something that also rubs me the wrong way.
When Trump was inaugurated back in 2017, I went to get a tattoo. It said “I rebel” and was a cut line from Rogue One. I got this tattoo because I never wanted to be associated with Trump and his harmful views. I wanted it to be clear that his fascist ways were something I’d fight against no matter how hard I had to fight back. Because it was the right thing to do.
I’ve loved Star Wars for as long as I can remember, and watching these conservatives see themselves as the rebellion because they’re being “silenced” is beyond frustrating. You’re not being silenced; you all have weird-ass YouTube channels and huge platforms that you spew your hatred on and no one stops you.
Gina Carano and Ben Shapiro are not the “rebellion.” They’re not the heroes in this story. I can be cheesy and call them the Empire but they don’t even deserve to be associated with this franchise any more than they already are. I’d be forever happy if we can all just go back to the Din Djarin/Grogu show in peace.
So there you have it, folks. I watched an hour-long interview where Gina Carano says that she waited until 2020 to vote for the first time so you don’t have to.
(image: The Daily Wire)
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