Karla Sofia Gascon’s trainwreck CNN interview as Emilia Perez star apologises for and defends offensive tweets

Oscar contender Karla Sofia Gascon is, once again, on the defensive over a series of resurfaced tweets that many have called racist and offensive.

In a trainwreck hour-long interview, Gascon, a Spanish transgender actor who has been nominated for her performance in musical film Emilia Perez, appeared at times contrite, at times frustrated, at times defensive and at times weepy as she repeatedly cried.

Gascon has faced a barrage of criticism since tweets attributed to her made the rounds last week. Authored by Gascon in 2020 and 2021, many of the posts were Islamophobic while others expressed negative sentiment towards George Floyd, whose murder at the hands of police officer Derek Chauvin, sparked a renewed Black Lives Matter movement.

She also criticised the 2021 Oscars ceremony as an “Afro-Korean festival”, referencing the acting wins that year of Youn Yuh-jung and Daniel Kaluuya in the supporting performance categories.

Gascon, speaking in Spanish to CNN’s Juan Carlos Arciniegas, repeated some of the apologies she had already issued through statements, that she was “not racist” and said she was sorry to “all the people who may have felt offended for the way I expressed myself in my past, in my present and in my future”.

But the interview was more notable for how Gascon tried to defend herself while asserting she was the victim of an online smear campaign. “I have been convicted and sacrificed and crucified and stoned without a trial, and without the option to defend myself,” she said.

At various points, Gascon said she related to minorities because of discrimination she had faced in her life as a trans woman.

“I feel and very much identify with the people who were thrown off buses for the colour of their skin, with the people who did not want them to study at university, for the people who were hated simply for existing, like how I am hated in this moment.”

She attempted to defend her George Floyd tweet by explaining that she was trying to point out hypocrisy. She also said in response to the Islamophobic tweets that she now has a personal relationship with a Muslim woman, “whom I adore, whom I love and who has taught me so much about respect for people”.

Gascon added that this woman supported her “100 per cent”.

She said the 2004 Madrid train bombings were near home and that she was specifically opposed to “radical Islam” and also brought up an accident that killed her brother which led her to feel resentment towards humans.

Gascon contended that her many of tweets have been misinterpreted and that she was not always sharing her own opinion but, rather, pointing out hypotheticals.

A tweet critical of her Emilia Perez co-star Selena Gomez was not written by her, Gascon claimed, adding that she also didn’t “recognise” other posts that have been attributed to her.

She also said she had treated her social media platform as a kind of diary of reflections that three people had seen before she gained an international profile, and that she often used “irony, sarcasm and exaggeration”.

Last month, Gascon became the first openly transgender actor to be nominated for a performance category. She emphasised she could not renounce the nomination because she had “not committed any crime nor have I harmed anyone, I am neither racist nor anything that all these people have tried to make others believe I am”.

She cried as she described what she felt she had gone through in the past week.

“I have not stopped receiving hate, death threats, insults, abuses,” she told CNN. “I have not seen anyone who has come out, in any media, any space, any place, raise their hand for me, and say, ‘Hey, what is happening with this person who you are massacring?’.

“And no one, no one has lifted a single finger for change.”

The case of Gascon’s public implosion is a cautionary tale for celebrities, especially those mounting an awards season campaign. Questions have been asked why the filmmaker, the studio and Netflix, which bought the rights to Emilia Perez for the US and UK after its Cannes premiere, did not do their due diligence on Gascon’s social media history.

Trade publications Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter said the CNN interview was not organised through Netflix, which is running Emilia Perez’s Oscars campaign.

It has also created a headache for her co-stars and collaborators, who are prosecuting campaigns of their own and may not want to be associated or photographed with Gascon at future events.

Emilia Perez is the leading Oscar nominee this year with 13 nods and is also up for gongs from the Screen Actors Guild, BAFTAs, Cesars, and various critics groups and professional guilds.

Co-star Zoe Saldana, a frontrunner in the supporting actress race, distanced herself over the weekend at an event in London. She told the audience, “It makes me really sad because I don’t support (what Gascon posted) and I don’t have any tolerance for any negative rhetoric towards people of any group”.