Oscar nominee Karla Sofía Gascón, the star of Emilia Pérez, has apologized after coming under fire for a bevy of Islamophobic and racist remarks found on her personal X account.
“I want to acknowledge the conversation around my past social media posts that have caused hurt,” Gascón said in a statement obtained by Vanity Fair. “As someone in a marginalized community, I know this suffering all too well and I am deeply sorry to those I have caused pain. All my life I have fought for a better world. I believe light will always triumph over darkness.”
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 Arab community, and Islam.
“Islam is marvelous, without any machismo. Women are respected, and when they are so respected they are left with a little squared hole on their faces for their eyes to be visible and their mouths, but only if she behaves. Although they dress this way for their own enjoyment. How DEEPLY DISGUSTING OF HUMANITY,” read one post on Gascón’s X account on September 3, 2020, translated from Spanish to English by Variety. The post also included a photo of a Muslim family in a restaurant, including a woman in a burqa.
Another post shared on Gascón’s page (but later deleted) and translated from Spanish to English 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.”