Karla Sofía Gascón Removed from ‘Emilia Pérez’ Oscar Campaign Amid Scandal

“Emilia Pérez” blew away many critics while dividing audiences, earning 13 Academy Award nominations — more than any other film this year — but its Oscar campaign is now happening without star Karla Sofía Gascón. 

In less than a month, she could have become the first out trans Best Actress winner, but that hype train has gone completely off the rails as she is engulfed in a social media scandal over her past tweets, which many view as racist and Islamophobic. 

Speaking in Spanish on CNN this week, Karla defended herself, insisting, “I am neither racist nor anything that all these people have tried to make others believe I am.”

“Extra” spoke with Variety’s Marc Malkin, who broke down the drama, saying, “Things are just in complete implosion mode at Netflix when it comes to ‘Emilia Pérez.’ Netflix has even taken Karla’s image off of posters and campaign ads.”

It is a remarkable turn of events for an actor who plays the title character in the film.

Months ago, “Extra” sat down with Karla, who praised co-star Selena Gomez, calling the movie her “best work.”

However, an alleged tweet from Gascón’s account two years earlier referred to Selena as a “rich rat.”

Karla claimed that tweet was fake, telling CNN, “I would never refer to her that way.”

Malkin told “Extra,” “Karla has deactivated her Twitter account. It’s really hard to tell, but I think the damage is there because all those other tweets are pretty bad.”

Gomez hasn’t made any public comment on Gascón’s alleged tweets, but Zoe Saldaña expressed her disappointment at a recent screening of the film.

In a video obtained by THR, Saldaña, the frontrunner to win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance in the movie, said, “It makes me really sad. I don’t support and I don’t have any tolerance for any negative rhetoric towards people of any group.”

The film’s director, Jacques Audiard, who has been criticized himself for comments he made about Spanish being “the language of modest countries,” strongly rebuked his star in an interview with Deadline on Wednesday, stating, “I haven’t spoken to her, and I don’t want to. 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. I’m thinking in this thing of how hurting others, of how she’s hurting the crew and all these people who worked so incredibly hard on this film. I’m thinking of myself, I’m thinking of Zoe [Saldaña] and Selena [Gomez]. I just don’t understand why she’s continuing to harm us.”

It has been reported that Gascón will miss the Critics Choice Awards, the Producers Guild Awards, and other award-season events due to the controversy.

The actress, who is Spanish, will also skip the Goya Awards in Spain on Saturday, according to Variety.