Awards season might be done, but it’s clear that Karla Sofía Gascón still feels raw about her chances of Oscar glory being dashed by her historical social media rants.
The Emilia Pérez star was on course to make history as the first openly transgender actress to win an Academy Award when journalist Sarah Hagi uncovered her questionable X/Twitter missives dating back to 2016.
In posts that went unnoticed by Netflix, Gascón wrote that Islam was a “hotbed of infection for humanity,” described Floyd as a “drug addict swindler” and said that the 2021 Oscars were an “ugly” “Afro-Korean festival” after triumphs for Minari and Judas and the Black Messiah.
She also pondered that she does not “understand so much about the world war against Hitler, he simply had his opinion about Jews,” and regularly used a Spanish word that translates as “faggot” in English.
Gascón has veered between being apologetic and remorseful about the posts, to raging against her critics. At an event to promote her biographical book Lo que queda de mi (What’s Left of Me) this week, Gascón chose the latter — coming out swinging over the storm that engulfed her.
“It’s clear that there was a campaign against me and that they kept going until they got what they were after,” she said, according to The Guardian newspaper. Gascón, who said recently that the scandal had led her to “contemplate the unthinkable,” has not produced evidence of a conspiracy.
Asked whether she felt she had been forgiven for her social media posts, she responded: “No one has to forgive me for anything. If anyone feels offended by things I may have done in my life, let them come and tell me.”
“They’ve said that I’m far-right or racist or whatever,” she added, in remarks reported by El Mundo. “But if there’s one thing I’ve done all my life, it’s that I’ve been against all this. When I was young, I used to fight with skinheads … When someone comes up to me and I ask them: ‘But what is it about me that offends you?’, no one can come up with anything or tell me anything.”
Netflix quietly distanced itself from Gascón at the height of the backlash, but invited her back into the fold for the Oscars, after which she attended the streamer’s awards party. Netflix has never disavowed her tweets in public, with its first substantive comment on the matter coming from chief content officer Bela Bajaria, who simply said it was a “bummer” for the Emilia Pérez campaign.
Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos told Variety this week that the company would work with Gascón again. “You have to have some grace when people make mistakes. And we have grace,” he said.
