Gina Carano’s Long Way Back
It was more than a decade ago, in a hallway near an arena, when Gina Carano first met Ronda Rousey.
Carano was wearing big blue heels — she remembers this clearly — on her way down to the ringside seats. Rousey was an Olympic judoka with a few professional fights and a name nobody really knew yet.
She walked up with what Carano now describes as “a mischievous grin,” looked her in the eye, and said, “You’re not that big.” Carano, in the heels, looked down at Rousey and said, “Hi, Ronda.”
Related Stories
Movies
Pedro Pascal Fights Back Tears During 'Mandalorian and Grogu' Event in Mexico
Movies
'Mandalorian & Grogu:' Lucasfilm to Sneak 25 Minutes at Imax Fan Event
That was the introduction. They never fought. Rousey became the most famous woman in the history of mixed martial arts, won and lost the U.F.C. bantamweight title, retired, joined the W.W.E., retired again.
Carano, meanwhile, went the other way: She made Haywire, for Steven Soderbergh, a Fast & Furious sequel, and then, in 2019, joined The Mandalorian as Cara Dune, a New Republic shock trooper who was meant to anchor her own spinoff, Rangers of the New Republic.
In February 2021, Lucasfilm let her go after a series of social-media posts — among them a Twitter bio that read “beep/bop/boop,” added shortly after her co-star Pedro Pascal had put “he/him” in his, and an Instagram post comparing the contemporary American climate for conservatives to that of Jews in Nazi Germany.
The studio called the posts “abhorrent and unacceptable,” and said they had denigrated people “based on their cultural and religious identities.” The spinoff was scrapped. Cara Dune was written out.
Three years later, with the backing of Elon Musk, Carano sued the Walt Disney Company for wrongful termination. The suit settled this past August, with a statement from Disney whose tone was markedly different compared to the harsh firing announcement that came before it.
“With this lawsuit concluded, we look forward to identifying opportunities to work together with Ms. Carano in the near future,” read the statement, attributed to a Lucasfilm spokesperson. “Ms. Carano was always well respected by her directors, co-stars, and staff, and she worked hard to perfect her craft while treating her colleagues with kindness and respect.”
With the suit behind her, Carano’s next move is not in the acting arena but in the ring. She finds herself preparing to fight Rousey in Los Angeles at the Intuit Dome on May 16 — what will mark the first move into MMA from Most Valuable Promotions, the company founded in 2021 by Jake Paul and Nakisa Bidarian.
After that single hallway run-in a decade ago, neither woman encountered each other again until the buildup for this fight began. In the months since, they have stood across from each other repeatedly, at press conferences and at the choreographed staredowns the modern fight calendar require.
At every one of them, Carano says, Rousey has looked up and said, in some variation, the same thing: “You’re really not that big.”
Carano laughs as she relays that in a recent phone conversation. She is, by her own measurement, two inches taller than Rousey, and she outweighs her by some unspecified amount. “I’m still bigger than you,” was her response.
Carano is 43; Rousey, 39. Carano lives in Las Vegas, where, for the last six months, she has been training out of a fighting gym. Older men and teenagers stop her between rounds, she said, to tell her she looks lean.
The transformation has been considerable. In September 2024 — about six months after the last time she sat down with The Hollywood Reporter — she was by her own account pre-diabetic, depressed and physically unable to walk long distances without pain.
“I was in a horrific condition, just physically and a bit emotionally,” she says. “I kind of lost my way and was just depressed.”
In late January of this year, she got on a Zoom with Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau and Lucasfilm chief creative officer Dave Filoni. She had mentioned it on a podcast, and the line had been picked up — “Gina Carano talks to Jon Favreau” — and used in blogs and social media to suggest either that Cara Dune was returning or that nothing of the kind had been discussed.
“I think it was, ‘let’s touch base,’” Carano says of the conversation. “Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni were two people that I always respected, and we went through two seasons together, and we had a great relationship. And even during everything that was happening, Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau were never the bad guys to me.”
She would not reveal whether the conversation had touched on a possible return to Star Wars.
“I won’t really disclose any of that,” she says, “but I will say that for me, it was an important conversation. To Zoom, to see each other, to mend whatever, to make sure everybody was good. And everybody was good.”
She did not tell them about the upcoming fight; the news about it had not yet broken. She says she found herself thinking, during and after the call, that she hoped Favreau’s The Mandolarian and Grogu — the feature film he is directing, set in the universe she was once a part of and opening May 22 — does well at the box office.
“Jon Favreau directed it, and he’s a good man,” she says. “He’s a great storyteller. He’s an amazing artist. And I would really like to see all of this turmoil within the Star Wars fandom kind of come to an end. It just feels like it’s a never-ending war.”
The turmoil within the Star Wars fandom, in Carano’s telling, is a microcosm of a broader sickness. There are, she says, “two extremist sides” — one that “really tried to get me canceled, and succeeded,” and another that reacts to the first.
She says she believes outrage culture is simmering down. She would not say whether she stood by the social-media posts that ended her run on The Mandalorian, nor did I ask her to relitigate them. (She has, in previous interviews, declined to apologize for them, while describing the Holocaust comparison as having been misread.)
The settlement with Disney is bound by confidentiality. Asked whether she had been remunerated as part of it, she responds, “I’m not able to talk about the details of the settlement. I’m not able to talk about anything regarding it.”
What she would talk about, at length, was a single sentence in the statement Disney issued in August: the one about how she was “always well respected by her directors, co-stars and staff,” and that Disney looks “forward to identifying opportunities to work together.”
She reads the line over the phone.
“Nobody really picked it up,” she says. “But it’s such a remarkable contrast from that first very horrendous statement that they had put out years earlier. I don’t recall Disney really doing that a lot at the time. That speaks leagues.”
She suspects the press prefers grievance to reconciliation and insists she is not holding grudges.
“I love peace,” she says. “When all parties can be happy, we can move on” from a chapter of her life she refers to as “a very harsh education.”
Her relationship with Pedro Pascal, her former co-star, is one of the casualties of the period. Pascal, who never publicly denounced her during the firing, was, she previously said, the cast member who quietly urged her, in the months before, to placate her critics — to say what the online mob wanted to hear.
The two last spoke, she says, when their castmate Carl Weathers died in February 2024.
“But no,” she clarifies. “Me and Pedro don’t keep in touch.”
Asked about Kathleen Kennedy, who has left her position as president of Lucasfilm, Carano says, “I wish her the best.” She adds that she hopes Kennedy would one day write a book or be the subject of a documentary: “You never know what somebody else is going through.”
The fight itself, against Rousey, is something Carano appears cautious not to over-explain. It is the thing that has defined or the past six months. The appeal of fighting, as opposed to acting or business, she explains, is its honesty: “The opponent that you’re training for is right in front of you. And you know what their intentions are, and they know your intentions are.”
In the years she has been away from the ring, professional fighting has changed. She worried, before this camp began, that she would no longer “fit into the world of fighting” because “everybody has to be almost like a W.W.E. character now.”
She had braced, in particular, for Rousey to play a villainous part — to deliver the trash-talking heel turn that the buildup machine, in 2026, seems to demand of any fight worth selling.
The persona has not materialized.
Rousey, in Carano’s account, has been straightforward, even warm, at the press conferences; she has not, so far as Carano can tell, performed for the cameras at all.
“I wasn’t sure how she was going to stand across to me or talk to me,” Carano says. “And it’s been refreshing. It’s just been super refreshing.”
Carano is plotting out her next moves for after the fight. She has a new manager, who is also a producer, and who, she says, “popped up when I needed him.”
There are projects in development, she says. She wants to return to acting, but differently this time — “to tell stories, and to be passionate about my work, like never before.”
The Disney statement, and the Favreau Zoom, suggest the door is not closed. For now, at least, she is three weeks out.
“I’m coming from prediabetic, just in horrific condition, to becoming an athlete again,” she says, confidently and brightly. “And to do that in a year and a half — there’s just been so many different levels of it.” She mentions in passing that Rousey had wanted only one fight, and that the fight Rousey had wanted was hers.
“I’m taking that opportunity,” she says. “It’s been truly one of the hardest but healthiest things I’ve ever done for myself.”
THR Newsletters
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
Subscribe Sign Up