Another day, another development in the Karla Sofía Gascón controversy. On Wednesday, Emilia Pérez star and Oscar nominee, Zoe Saldaña, joined Variety‘s Awards Circuit Podcast to discuss—in part—the fallout of the resurfacing of seriously odious tweets from her co-star, Karla Sofía Gascón.
“I’m sad. Time and time again, that’s the word because that is the sentiment that has been living in my chest since everything happened,” Saldaña said. “I’m also disappointed. I can’t speak for other people’s actions. All I can attest to is my experience, and never in a million years did I ever believe that we would be here.”
The interview arrives just days after The Hollywood Reporter reported that Gascón will be sitting out most of the upcoming pre-Oscars events and isn’t currently communicating directly with Netflix, the film’s distributor. Netflix, according to the report, is also uninterested in providing transportation and accommodations to aid in Gascón’s attendance at any award season events. She has also since been removed from Netflix’s email blasts and ad-reads promoting the film.
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 a tweet from 2019, Gascón wrote that Hitler “simply had his opinions of the Jews.” She even punctuated it with a prayer hands emojis. In 2021, she took specific aim at the Oscars—where Daniel Kaluuya won Best Supporting Actor and Yuh-jung Youn won Best Supporting Actress— referring to the event as an “Afro-Korean festival,” “a Black Lives Matter demonstration,” and an “ugly, ugly gala.” All of the tweets have since been deleted.
After her tweets were unearthed, Gascón gave multiple statements to the press that were presumably not sanctioned by Emilia Perez‘s Oscar campaigners. In a CNN Español interview, she claimed she’s been “convicted and sacrificed and crucified and stoned without a trial and without the option to defend” herself. She also claimed that her co-stars, Saldaña and Selena Gomez, “support” her “200%.”
When asked about this specific claim of Gascón’s, Variety reported that Saldaña took “a long blink” and “did not confirm that claim.”
“I do not support any negative rhetoric of racism and bigotry towards any group of people,” she said. “That is what I want to stand for.”
Then, when asked whether she’s spoken with Gascón since the tweets went viral, Saldaña replied: “I feel like I’ve spoken enough about it.” She added that she’s still processing the situation and that it’s “not just something we have to figure out immediately.” I’ll note that Saldaña has only publicly addressed the controversy once, after a screening in London last week. I’ll further note that when it comes to processing”heinous espousals racism, homophobia, and Islamophobia, there really isn’t much to “figure out.”
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