Karla Sofía Gascón apologized on Thursday for the controversial tweets fans found on her social media accounts that same morning.
“I want to acknowledge the conversation around my past social media posts that have caused hurt,” Gascón said. “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 Emilia Pérez star made headlines early Thursday, when her old posts on X (formerly Twitter) resurfaced and incited controversy.
In separate tweets, Gascón had tweeted about the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the Muslim population in her native Spain.
“Let me get this straight, a guy tries to pass off a counterfeit bill after consuming methamphetamine, an idiot policeman arrives and goes too far in arresting him, killing him, ruining the lives of his family and his colleagues, and turning the guy with the bill into a martyr hero,” she wrote in the summer of 2020 (in Spanish, which was translated here by Google Translate). “I truly believe 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.”
Later that year, she tweeted, “Sorry, is it just my impression or are there more and 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,” she posted on Nov. 23, 2020. “Maybe next year instead of English we’ll have to teach Arabic.”
She also went on to suggest that Islam goes “against European values and violate human rights” and that the religion should be banned.
Emilia Pérez leads this year’s Oscar nominations with 13, including a best actress nod for Gascón, making her the first openly transgender actress to receive the honor. In another tweet, Gascón shared her thoughts on the 2021 Oscars telecast, which saw the best picture prize going to Nomadland: “More and more the #Oscars are looking like a ceremony for independent and protest films, I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M. Apart from that, an ugly, ugly gala.”
Several of Gascón’s posts disappeared from her account later on Thursday, with many expressing confusion over why they were still up in the first place, considering her own Oscars campaign. The controversy also comes after the actress suggested in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper that online forces are at work in an attempt to smear her and the Emilia Pérez team. “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,” she said. “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.”
