“Emilia Pérez” director Jacques Audiard and actor Zoe Saldaña have both weighed on the controversy swirling around the film’s star, Karla Sofía Gascón.
Last week, Gascón — who is nominated for best actress at the upcoming Oscars for her role in the French musical crime drama — faced backlash after a deep trove of racist and offensive social media posts were resurfaced on X. Those posts included tweets about Islam, George Floyd, diversity at the Oscars and much more.
Following an immediate uproar, Gascón offered an apology before deactivating her X account. But over the past several days, she has switched to attack mode, making multiple statements and conducting interviews claiming that she is the target of a “campaign of hate and misinformation” that has led to her being “harassed.”
In an interview with Deadline on Wednesday, Audiard called Gascón’s tweets “absolutely hateful and worthy of being hated.”
“I haven’t spoken to her, and I don’t want to,” Audiard continued. “She is in a self-destructive approach that I can’t interfere in, and I really don’t understand why she’s continuing. Why is she harming herself? Why? I don’t understand it, and what I don’t understand about this too is why she’s harming people who were very close to her.”
Asked about Gascón’s response to the controversy, Audiard said that the actor is “playing the victim.”
Gascón’s “Emilia Pérez” co-star Zoe Saldaña — who is nominated for best supporting actress — also expressed her “disappointment” in an interview for an upcoming episode of the Variety “Awards Circuit” podcast.
“I’m sad. Time and time again, that’s the word because that is the sentiment that has been living in my chest since everything happened,” Saldaña said. “I’m also disappointed. I can’t speak for other people’s actions. All I can attest to is my experience, and never in a million years did I ever believe that we would be here.”
In a broad-ranging interview with CNN Español on Saturday, Gascón — who broke down several times during the hour-long discussion — claimed that Saldaña and co-star Selena Gomez “support me 200 per cent.” She also claimed, at one point, that “if I were racist, I wouldn’t work with Zoe Saldaña.”
When asked by Variety about whether she supported Gascón, Saldaña paused, before referring back to a previous statement she made while in London last week.
“I do not support any negative rhetoric of racism and bigotry towards any group of people,” she said.
Gomez, who received a Golden Globe nomination for her work in “Emilia Pérez,” has not weighed in on the controversy.
In a Spanish tweet surfaced from 2023, Gascón called Gomez “a rich rat who acts like a poor wretch whenever she can.”
In her CNN Español interview, Gascón denied that it was her who made the tweet: “It’s not mine, of course,” she said.
Gascón, 52, is the first openly trans actor to earn an Oscar nomination for her starring role in “Emilia Pérez,” a Netflix film that is nominated for 13 Oscars, including best picture. In January, the Spanish performer won the 2025 Golden Globe for best actress in a musical or comedy.
Her social media posts, shared between 2016 and 2023, were discovered by journalist Sarah Hagi.
Many of those posts disparaged Islam, including one that described the faith as ”a hotbed of infection for humanity that urgently needs to be cured.”
In a post from 2020, Gascón shared a photo of a Muslim family eating dinner, including a woman wearing a burqa. “How DEEPLY DISGUSTING OF HUMANITY,” her post said. In 2021, she wrote that “the West should ban Islam.”
Variety reported that in 2021, the year that Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland” won best picture at the Oscars, Gascón posted, “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.”
Gascón also shared a long thread about George Floyd following Floyd’s murder by a police officer in 2020.
“I really think that very few people ever cared about George Floyd, a drug addict swindler, but his death has served to once again demonstrate that there are people who still consider black people to be monkeys without rights and consider policemen to be assassins,” she wrote. “They’re all wrong.”
The uproar was immediate. Hours later, Gascón issued an apology that read in part, “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.”
On Friday morning, Gascón deactivated her X account. Several hours later, Gascón shared a lengthy statement with the Hollywood Reporter explaining her decision to deactivate her account, saying that she “can no longer allow this campaign of hate and misinformation to affect neither my family nor me anymore.”
“I am a human being who also made, makes and will make mistakes from which I will learn,” she wrote. “I am not perfect. Taking my words out of context or manipulating them to hurt me is something I am not responsible for.”
“Emilia Pérez” tells the story of a fictional Mexican drug trafficker nicknamed Manitas del Monte (Gascón), who leaves behind a life of crime by becoming a transgender woman and activist. But problems arise due to Manitas’ uncontrollable jealousy toward her ex-wife Jessi (Gomez).
The film’s 13 Oscar nominations are a record for a non-English-language film, but it’s faced backlash over its portrayal of Mexico, which critics say glamourizes the violence that has long plagued the country.
The film has also faced criticism from some people in the transgender community.
In November, GLAAD, a non-profit LGBTQ advocacy organization, published an editorial describing “Emilia Pérez” as a “profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman.”
The 2025 Oscars are on March 2.
