Last week Karla Sofía Gascón received widespread backlash when a number of racist and Islamaphobic posts that had been published on her X account were unearthed in a viral thread from writer and podcaster Sarah Hagi. The resurfaced tweets—which also covered topics such as George Floyd, Oscars diversity, and even Gascón’s Emilia Pérez co-star Selena Gomez—promptly cast a shadow over her movie, which is nominated for 13 Oscars—the most of any film this year, as well as the most ever for a movie not in the English language. Just weeks ago, Gascón herself made history as the first out trans performer to get an Oscar nomination for best actress.
Soon after the old tweets went viral, Gascón issued a pair of statements. But while the first was apologetic, the second was a bit more combative—and now Gascón has addressed the controversy once again, in an hourlong interview to CNN En Español. “I believe I have been judged, I have been convicted and sacrificed and crucified and stoned without a trial and without the option to defend myself,” Gascón said in the sit-down, which was translated from Spanish by CNN. Vanity Fair has learned that Netflix, Emilia Pérez’s distributor, was not aware of or involved in the booking of this interview.
The actor insisted on CNN that she will not withdraw from Oscar contention. “I cannot step down from an Oscar nomination because I have not committed any crime, nor have I harmed anyone,” said Gascón, according to CNN. “I am neither racist nor anything that all these people have tried to make others believe I am.”
When confronted with individual resurfaced tweets, Gascón said there were many she did not “recognize,” including a 2022 post where she allegedly refered to Gomez as a “rich rat.” According to Gascón, “It’s not mine, of course. I have never said anything about my colleague; I would never refer to her that way.”
When asked about a tweet in which she referred to George Floyd—who was murdered by police in 2020—as “a drug addict and a hustler,” Gascón said that she “obviously” supports the Black Lives Matter movement and meant to highlight others’ racism in her tweet, according to translation by Deadline. She uses “irony, sarcasm and at times exaggeration,” in her tweets, said Gascón, “and of course I use a resource to talk in third person, if what I wrote was written by someone who thinks in a negative manner.” The actor also said that she sees her social media as “more like a diary” filled with “reflections, as opposed to something that can influence someone—because before being here, my post was viewed by three people.”
Gascón also addressed a tweet she wrote about the 2021 Oscars, in which she seemed to denigrate Daniel Kaluuya and Yuh-Jung Youn’s respective wins: “I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M,” she wrote. Gascón called that commentary a “stupidity,” according to Deadline, and said that Kaluuya and Youn “surely deserved those awards for all of their work and not for who they are.”
Voting for the 2025 Oscars ends on February 18. Gascón has accused her detractors of conspiring to tank her movie’s awards campaign before that deadline comes to pass. “They have dedicated themselves to searching, to put together all the things that I had said at a time that I had written—most of which are false,” Gascón said, per a translation by The Hollywood Reporter. “And they put them all together, and so it seems that she is a very bad person. And we remove her just when we can do the most damage—right in the [Oscars] voting period.”
It is unclear if Gascón’s past actions have dashed awards hopes for Emilia Pérez. But if they have, life will go on for the actor. “I don’t give a damn about awards,” she said. “What I do care about is the people that I represent, because of what I represent in this world. We can all change and be better people in this world.”
