Disney fired fan favorite Gina Carano for the dumbest reason possible. And the least responsible.
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Carano, who played Cara Dune on Disney+’s “The Mandalorian,” got canned for a social media post pleading for tolerance.
She pointed to the growing anti-Jewish sentiment in 1930s Germany, comparing it to how conservatives were being “othered” in America.
“Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?” she wrote.
Overheated? Prescient? Either way, the comments were neither vicious nor remotely antisemitic. A thousand celebrities have said a thousand worse things without a single repercussion.
Disney dumped her anyway. Carano later sued the Mouse House, and the parties settled their differences out of court.
That unfair chapter of Hollywood history came to mind via a very different celebrity. Actor Mark Ruffalo, a regular in Disney’s MCU franchise as the rampaging Hulk, caught heat for comments deemed antisemitic.
It wasn’t a few click-happy bloggers or Instagram accounts, mind you, but groups like The Brigade that castigated the star for slamming the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger.
The Brigade consists of “nearly 1,000 members, friends, and allies of the Jewish community who are proud to be working in film, television, music, Broadway, social and digital, and other platforms in and around the entertainment industry,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Ruffalo isn’t alone in La La Land for opposing the Hollywood mega-merger. His attempt to lasso Israel into the dispute, though, was. The actor posted a video targeting Jewish Paramount board member Safra Catz, saying she “revels in … genocide,” an obvious reference to Israel’s defensive war against Hamas following the Oct. 7 attacks.
He added that the Ellisons, who own Paramount and are Jewish, are “crushing workers and consolidating the wealth of the world for their own power.”
The group called out Ruffalo for deploying “antisemitic tropes” in his critiques. Paramount Skydance officially blasted the star, too, for his “appalling and fundamentally dishonest” verbiage.
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The Simon Wiesenthal Center and Creative Communities For Peace also lashed out against Ruffalo. Jim Berk, CEO of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said the actor had crossed a bright red line.
“Words matter, and so does the willingness to draw a line when legitimate debate gives way to antisemitic tropes.”
Ruffalo has aggressively defended himself against the charges, as have fellow far-left actors Hannah Einbinder and John Cusack.
Now, what?
This isn’t a single social media post. It’s a series of comments that drew sizable outrage from major figures in entertainment and culture.
So we’ll be seeing a new Hulk actor soon, right? Hardly.
Ruffalo just appeared in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, a Sony feature film that is part of Disney’s larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. He won’t star in Avengers: Doomsday, hitting theaters this December, but he could reappear as Dr. Bruce Banner, aka the Hulk, in Avengers: Secret Wars, coming in late 2027.
Disney hasn’t officially cut ties with the actor, nor has the studio publicly commented on his allegedly antisemitic comments.
Actors shouldn’t necessarily be fired for having the wrong opinions, even those that teeter on the edge of idiocy. Yet that’s the world Hollywood helped create in recent years.
Still, what’s the difference between Carano and Ruffalo, beyond the more insidious nature of Ruffalo’s comments? Why did one trigger a swift dismissal, and the other hasn’t sparked any response?
It’s simple. Ideology.
Carano wasn’t an openly conservative star at the time of her dismissal, but she questioned elements of the COVID-19 protocols and the explosion of personal pronouns and other subjects that clashed with progressive groupthink.
That slapped a target on her back.
Ruffalo is one of the most stridently progressive stars in Hollywood. That offers him a robust defense against any such accusations.
That means he’ll likely play the big, green guy for as long as he wants to cash those Disney checks.
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