Tearful Oscar Nominee Defends Staying in Awards Race Amid Tweet Scandal

Emilia Pérez actress and Oscar nominee Karla Sofia Gascón tearfully refused to drop out of the best actress race in an hour-long interview to salvage her film’s award show chances after she was accused of posting racially insensitive tweets.

In the CNN en Español interview Saturday, an emotional Gascón reiterated her apologies, though she insinuated her tweets' resurfacing was part of a campaign to sabotage her award chances.

Scores of posts came to light last week that showed Gascón making racist, Islamophobic, and xenophobic tweets for years. Gascón arranged the interview herself, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

She also said she would not renounce her historic Oscar nomination for best actress, one of 13 nominations Emilia Pérez earned last month and the first best actress nomination for a trans actor. Gascón plays a Mexican drug lord who undergoes gender-affirming surgery, leading a musical that mixes drama and allegory to polarizing reactions.

“I cannot renounce a nomination because what I have done is a job and what is being valued is my acting work,” Gascón said. “And I cannot renounce a nomination either because I have not committed any crime nor have I harmed anyone, I am not a racist, nor am I anything that all these people have taken it upon themselves to try to make others believe that I am.”

Gascón tried to clean up specific tweets throughout the interview, including her 2020 comments saying she believed “very few people ever cared about George Floyd, a drug addict and a hustler” before he was killed by a police officer. “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,” she wrote.

She said on Saturday the post was intended to call out the hypocrisy of those elevating Floyd to attack police brutality after he was killed. But Gascón claimed she would never attack someone over their race.

“But for someone to think that … I have ever insulted a person because of their skin color, I do not allow that to anyone, to anyone,” she said.

Gascón has issued various statements since the tweets resurfaced last week, eventually taking her X account down entirely. She wrote on Instagram on Saturday, while vowing to send a message of hope and love, she believes her detractors “have already won.”

“They have achieved their objective, to stain my existence with lies or things taken out of context,” she wrote.

But Gascón’s comments, paired with her remarks last week accusing the social media team of fellow best actress nominee Fernanda Torres of sabotage, have upended the Oscar race and potentially imperiled the film’s chances of success. The Hollywood Reporter‘s executive editor of awards coverage Scott Feinberg wrote on Saturday that Oscar voters “are going to have a hard time voting for Emilia Pérez in any category, given that Emilia Pérez herself has become toxic."

Zoe Saldaña, whose performance as a lawyer who helps Gascón’s character get the procedure catapulted her to a best supporting actress nomination, said during a Q&A Friday that Gascón’s past remarks “makes me really sad because I don’t support [it].”

“I don’t have any tolerance for any negative rhetoric towards people of any group,” she said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “I can only attest to the experience that I had with each and every individual that was a part, that is a part, of this film, and my experience and my interactions with them was about inclusivity and collaboration and racial, cultural and gender equity. And it just saddens me.”