‘Emilia Pérez’ Star Karla Sofía Gascón Sparks Outrage for Posts About Islam

Oscar nominee Karla Sofía Gascón, the star of Emilia Pérez, is under fire for a bevy of Islamophobic and racist remarks found on her personal X account.

The posts on the website formerly known as Twitter were first publicized in a viral X thread from writer and podcaster Sarah Hagi. On Thursday, January 30, Hagi resurfaced screenshots of old posts from Gascón’s personal X account which contained a multitude of insensitive remarks about Muslim people, the Arabic community, and Islam.

by Variety reads, “I’m sorry, is it just my impression or is there more Muslims in Spain? Every time I go to pick up my daughter from school there are more women with their hair covered and their skirts down to their heels. Next year instead of English we’ll have to teach Arabic.”

Hagi’s thread contained screenshots of 12 posts she allegedly found on Gascón’s page. Many of the posts were apparently published between 2020 and 2021, with the earliest post in Hagi’s thread bearing a 2016 time stamp. In a separate thread, which is now deleted, Gascón’s account reportedly commented on the 2020 murder of George Floyd. “I truly believed that very few people ever cared about George Floyd, a drug addict and a hustler, but his death has served to highlight once again that there are those who still consider black people to be monkeys without rights and those who consider the police to be murderers. All wrong,” read the post, as translated from Spanish via Google Translate.

Gascón’s verified X account is still live, but some of the posts highlighted by Variety and Hagi also appear to have been deleted.

Gascón is the first openly trans actress to be nominated for an Academy Award. She leads Emilia Pérez, also starring Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez, which received 13 total Oscar nominations—the most for any film this season, as well as the most ever for a movie not in the English language. The film has been both widely celebrated on the awards circuit and dogged by controversy ever since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won two prizes and was acquired by Netflix in a splashy deal. It’s since won a best-film prize at the European Film Awards and the award for best musical or comedy at this month’s Golden Globes.

Once the movie premiered on Netflix, several trans critics, as well as GLAAD, spoke out against the film, criticizing it as a regressive and simplistic portrait of the trans experience. (On social media, one musical number in particular has inspired outright mockery.) Speaking with Vanity Fair earlier this month, Gascón pushed back: “Being LGBTQ, having those labels, does not remove your stupidity, just like heterosexuality does not remove your stupidity. What bothers me is that the people that say things like that [are] just sitting down at home doing nothing. If you don’t like it, go and make your own movie. Go create the representation you want to see for your community.”

The film has also been criticized by Mexican audiences, including Oscar-nominated filmmaker Rodrigo Prieto, who called out its “inauthentic” depiction of the country and its casting of predominantly non-Mexican actors (Gascón is Spanish). Mexican actor Eugenio Derbez also critiqued Selena Gomez’s use of Spanish. (Derbez later apologized to Gomez for his remarks.) Director Jacques Audiard, who does not speak Spanish, ignited backlash when he said in French in a recent interview, “Spanish is a language of modest countries, of developing countries, of the poor and migrants.”

Gascón has often addressed the backlash to Emilia Pérez on social media, to increasing scrutiny. On Wednesday, her comments to Folha de S.Paulo, a Brazilian daily newspaper, went viral as she seemed to suggest that supporters of the Brazilian film I’m Still Here and its star Fernanda Torres were orchestrating a campaign against her: “What I don’t like are social media teams—people who work with these people—trying to diminish our work, like me and my movie, because that doesn’t lead anywhere. You don’t need to tear down someone’s work to highlight another’s. I have never, at any point, said anything bad about Fernanda Torres or her movie. However, there are people working with Fernanda Torres tearing me and Emilia Pérez down. That speaks more about their movie than mine.”

After these comments were widely picked up, Gascón issued a clarification: “I am an enormous fan of Fernanda Torres and it has been wonderful getting to know her the past few months,” she said in a statement obtained by Variety. “In my recent comments, I was referencing the toxicity and violent hate speech on social media that I sadly continue to experience. Fernanda has been a wonderful ally, and no one directly associated with her has been anything but supportive and hugely generous.”

Vanity Fair has reached out to Gascón and Netflix for comment.

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