Gina Carano’s Hollywood Reporter interview dropped this week, and the most revealing thing in it was what she didn’t say. Asked about Kathleen Kennedy, the Lucasfilm president who presided over her firing in February 2021, Carano kept it short. “I wish her the best,” she said. She added that she hoped Kennedy would one day write a book or become the subject of a documentary. “You never know what somebody else is going through.”
That sentence reveals quite a distance traveled from the version of Carano who posted on X in October 2023 about Kennedy’s “publicist ghouls,” her “online mob,” and the executives she said would “sell their soul to work for Lucasfilm.” That Carano was still burning. This one has moved past it.
What changed is the lawsuit. Carano, backed by Elon Musk’s X Corp legal fund, sued Disney and Lucasfilm in 2024. The case settled earlier this year. The terms are confidential. What is not confidential is Disney’s official statement following the settlement, which Carano highlighted in the interview because almost nobody else noticed it. Disney said Carano “was always well respected by her directors, co-stars, and staff” and that the company looked “forward to identifying opportunities to work together with Ms. Carano in the near future.”
“Nobody really picked it up,” Carano said. “But it’s such a remarkable contrast from that first very horrendous statement that they had put out years earlier.”
The 2021 firing statement was designed to destroy her. The 2026 settlement statement reads like a door left open. Whether that door leads anywhere is a separate question. Carano told the Hollywood Reporter she has spoken with Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni. Nothing confirmed. She wants to return to acting “to tell stories, and to be passionate about my work, like never before.”
On Pedro Pascal, with whom she shared the screen in The Mandalorian’s first two seasons, she confirmed they no longer speak. The last contact was after Carl Weathers died in February 2024. She did not say it with bitterness. She said it as a fact. Pascal never publicly denounced her during the firing. Behind the scenes, per prior reporting, he advised her to tell critics what they wanted to hear. She chose not to. That choice cost her the role. She has not apologized for it.
Carano fights Ronda Rousey on Netflix on May 16. The appeal of fighting, she told the Hollywood Reporter, is its honesty. “The opponent that you’re training for is right in front of you. And you know what their intentions are, and they know what your intentions are.”
Hollywood does not operate that way. She knows that now in ways she did not in 2018 when she sat across from Kathleen Kennedy for the first time and got the part.
Is Gina Carano’s story in Hollywood over, or is the Disney settlement statement a signal of something more?
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