For months, the actor Karla Sofía Gascón had been reaping the rewards of main a prestigious movie. She performs the title character in Emilia Pérez, a couple of Mexican cartel boss who transitions into a lady and seeks to construct a extra virtuous life. The Spanish-language musical has confronted waves of backlash since its launch final yr—however it has additionally discovered a loyal fan base amongst awards our bodies.
Gascón was considered one of its anchors: She delivered an impassioned speech devoted to the trans group on the Cannes Movie Competition, the place she shared the Finest Actress prize along with her castmates. When Emilia Pérez gained the Golden Globe for Finest Musical or Comedy final month, Gascón movingly addressed the viewers. She made historical past shortly thereafter, changing into the primary overtly trans performer to earn an Oscar nomination. A relative unknown in america, the Spanish actor personified a message of tolerance and acceptance; Emilia Pérez, regardless of the entire criticism surrounding it, seemed to have elevated a star who matched the heroism of Emilia Pérez herself.
However her momentum quickly got here to a halt. A journalist found an array of Gascón’s tweets relationship again to 2016 that contained racist language and crude jokes a couple of vary of marginalized communities. In response, the actor stopped following the everyday awards-season playbook: She posted defensive updates on Instagram, despatched a long-winded assertion with out the help of a public-relations workforce to The Hollywood Reporter, and personally scheduled a prolonged, tearful interview on CNN en Español. Gascón turned Hollywood’s persona non grata, slightly below a month earlier than the Academy Awards ceremony.
The actor’s trajectory represents one of the crucial dramatic implosions of an awards run in Oscars historical past. Twists and gaffes taking place on the tail finish of a race—for which this yr’s voting spherical ended on Tuesday—are nothing new. (Gascón’s fellow Finest Actress nominee Fernanda Torres weathered her personal controversy this season; a clip of her sporting blackface in a comedy sketch resurfaced final month. The I’m Nonetheless Right here star responded by releasing a measured apology.) However the nature of Gascón’s fall is uncommon. Hardly ever has a nominee’s curated picture—that of a righteous up-and-comer, applauded by an trade wanting to reveal its tolerance—so totally differed from the one conjured by her private on-line accounts. Her case is an interesting take a look at how trade standing can collide with the social-media period: Despite the awards season’s purported goals to have a good time cinema, a performer’s off-screen narrative can matter simply as a lot as their work.
Gascón’s diminished probabilities of successful a trophy arguably resulted not a lot from the resurfacing of her bigoted tweets, however primarily from the way in which she diverged from established public-relations pointers. Oscar campaigns are usually rigorously managed endeavors, and Netflix, Emilia Pérez’s distributor in america, has one of the crucial skilled awards-strategy groups in Hollywood. The streamer had helped flip Gascón from an unknown within the U.S. right into a contender—and on the identical day that her outdated posts garnered consideration, Netflix circulated her official apology. “As somebody in a marginalized group,” learn the standard-issue assertion, “I do know this struggling all too nicely and I’m deeply sorry to these I’ve brought on ache.”
However quickly afterward—and reportedly with out clearing her plans with Netflix—Gascón went rogue. She despatched The Hollywood Reporter an extra assertion claiming that her tweets have been misunderstood, at occasions even by herself. (“Typically I, myself, am not even conscious of getting written one thing detrimental,” she wrote.) She shared ideas on Instagram about her phrases being taken out of context. And he or she scheduled the CNN en Español interview, throughout which she argued that she’d completed nothing incorrect. She additionally claimed that her co-stars—together with Zoe Saldaña, the Supporting Actress Oscar front-runner—supported her “200 %,” regardless of no public proof that they shared her sentiments. “I’ve not dedicated any crime, nor have I harmed anybody,” she stated. “I’m not a racist, nor am I something that each one these individuals have taken it upon themselves to attempt to make others imagine I’m.”
The extra Gascón tried to salvage her popularity by herself, the extra these related to the movie pulled away from her. Shortly after Emilia Pérez nabbed 13 Oscar nominations—probably the most of any film this yr—Netflix started eradicating billboards in Los Angeles that singled her out; the corporate has reportedly restricted her entry to the workforce’s journey funds, making it tougher for her to attend extra precursor award ceremonies. Gascón responded to feedback from the movie’s director, Jacques Audiard, about her “self-destructive method” by pledging on Instagram to remain silent going ahead. Earlier this month, Netflix’s chief content material officer, Bela Bajaria, addressed the scandal, calling the controversy “a bummer.” (The corporate can be “reevaluating” its technique for vetting actors’ social-media accounts, she stated.)
Gascón’s try to manage her picture is singular in its audacity. None of her fellow awards contenders this season has made such daring, unfiltered strikes whereas attempting to persuade Academy voters that they’re worthy of a trophy. Even earlier than her tweets resurfaced, the Emilia Pérez star had begun deviating from the movie’s normal promotional press marketing campaign by chiding Torres’s social-media technique. Criticizing one other nominee’s ways is an inadvisable step for somebody on the Oscar monitor; the act can come off as combative, and the Academy can penalize assaults towards fellow contenders. “There are individuals working with Fernanda Torres tearing me and Emilia Pérez down,” she claimed in an interview. “That speaks extra about their film than mine.” Gascón later retracted the remarks and defined that she wasn’t concentrating on her competitor, however merely attempting to admonish “toxicity and violent hate speech on social media.” After which, when her previous social-media posts got here up, she utterly ignored the foundations of the best way to face a blowback. She might have adopted in Torres’s footsteps—the I’m Nonetheless Right here actor had simply demonstrated how efficient sticking with a regular mea culpa will be—but as soon as once more, Gascón diverged from the norm.
Not everybody follows the Oscars playbook, in fact. However the different most unconventional marketing campaign this yr is notable as a result of it’s so totally not like what Gascón is doing. Timothée Chalamet, who’s up for his efficiency as Bob Dylan within the musical biopic A Full Unknown, actually appears to be defying the foundations of typical press excursions, stunning his look-alikes at a contest in New York Metropolis and using a Lime bike onto the purple carpet at a premiere, amongst different antics. Chalamet’s efforts have labored partly as a result of he’s a longtime, controversy-free celeb, a family title with movie-star enchantment. If something, his well-received run to this point, even when he doesn’t win the Oscar, underlines what made Gascón’s Hail Mary fail: Chalamet’s calculated, personality-driven stunts evoke the youthful renegade enchantment of the cultural icon he performed, courting chatter however not criticism.
In the meantime, Gascón’s defensive habits, by turns rebellious and inflammatory, undid the storyline she and Netflix had cultivated for months: that the actor intimately understood why Emilia Pérez succeeded with so many awards-season voters, lots of whom are Gascón’s friends. Gascón’s character within the movie is meant to epitomize the human capability for good, and for overcoming flaws with grace. After the actor’s tweets resurfaced, she emphasised that “gentle will all the time overcome darkness” in her Netflix-approved apology; the assertion repositioned Gascón as remorseful about her previous, similar to Emilia had been. But when Gascón appeared to exemplify the movie’s message early in its journey towards Oscar glory, she has come to embody a unique narrative—that of a stunning, largely self-inflicted public collapse. It’s not the sort that tends to win somebody an Oscar.
