Karla Sofía Gascón Will No Longer Participate in the ‘Emilia Pérez’ Oscar Campaign

Per The Hollywood Reporter, Netflix has ousted Gascón from promoting the film after her past racist and Islamophobic tweets resurfaced.

By Audra Heinrichs | February 4, 2025 | 12:39pm

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Karla Sofía Gascón Will No Longer Participate in the ‘Emilia Pérez’ Oscar Campaign

On Tuesday, the Hollywood Reporter reported that Karla Sofía Gascón will be sitting out most of the upcoming pre-Oscars events in light of her resurfaced—and seriously odious—tweets.

According to the outlet, the first openly trans woman to be nominated in the Oscars’ Best Actress category was expected to be in Los Angeles for a series of events this week, including the AFI Awards luncheon, the Critics Choice Awards, the Directors Guild Award, the Producers Guild Awards, and the Virtuoso Awards. Considering that Emilia Pérez leads the Oscar nominations with 13 in total, its ensemble cast’s presence at all of them would be inevitable. However, given its star’s racist, Islamophobic, and all-around hateful politics were recently revealed in resurfaced tweets, Gascón’s attendance would be, well, pretty damn uncomfortable for everyone else.

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In case news of her tweets missed you, here are a few examples of the kind of rhetoric Gascón was publicly posting between 2019 and 2021. In 2020, days after George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin, she tweeted: “I really think that very few people ever cared about George Floyd, a drug addict swindler, but his death has served to once again demonstrate that there are people who still consider black people to be monkeys Without rights and consider policemen to be assassins. They’re all wrong.” And in another tweet from 2019, Gascón wrote that Hitler “simply had his opinions of the Jews.” She even punctuated it with a prayer hands emojis. Unfortunately, these very public backings of bigotry continued in 2021 when she took specific aim at the Oscars, referring to it as an “Afro-Korean festival,” “a Black Lives Matter demonstration,” and an “ugly, ugly gala.” All of the tweets have since been deleted.

THR also said that Netflix, the distributor of Emilia Pérez, is—unsurprisingly—not happy with Gascón, not only for her tweets but for the onslaught of unauthorized press she’s done in the aftermath. Days after the tweets went viral, Gascón deactivated her account altogether and wrote in a statement to THR: “I’m sorry, but I can no longer allow this campaign of hate and misinformation to affect me and my family, so at their request I am closing my account on X. I have been threatened with death, insulted, abused and harassed to the point of exhaustion. I have a wonderful daughter to protect, whom I love madly and who supports me in everything.”

On Sunday, the actress also wept to CNN en Español in an interview.

“I believe I have been judged, I have been convicted and sacrificed and crucified and stoned without a trial and without the option to defend myself,” she said. Throughout the sit-down, she repeatedly insisted that she is “not racist” and extended her “most sincere apologies to all the people who may have felt offended for the way I express myself in my past, in my present and in my future.”

“I feel and very much identify with the people who were thrown off buses for the color of their skin, with the people who did not want them to study at university, for the people who were hated simply for existing, like how I am hated in this moment,” Gascón said that if the Academy withdraws her nomination, she’d ask for “a fair trial” and an opportunity to defend herself. (The Academy has yet to issue statement on the matter.)

THR further reported that the actress and Netflix are communicating solely through the former’s agent and as of now, Netflix isn’t interested in providing transportation and accommodations to aid in Gascón’s attendance at any award season events. She has since been removed from Netflix’s email blasts and ad-reads promoting the film as the streamer is reportedly still gunning for its other category nominations (including Best Supporting Actress nominee, Zoe Saldaña) to be successful.

Speaking of, Saldaña is the only cast member so far to address her tweets. “It makes me really sad because I don’t support (it), and I don’t have any tolerance for any negative rhetoric towards people of any group,” she said during a Q&A in London on Friday. Selena Gomez (another subject of Gascón’s tweets, though she denied it) has remained mum. Meanwhile, in the middle of this controversy, the film’s French director, Jacques Audiard, said the following in a recent interview: “Spanish is a language of modest countries, of developing countries, of the poor and migrants.”

Again, I ask: all this for that movie???