In an alternate 2026, Gina Carano is still a flourishing Hollywood actress and perhaps the star of her own “Mandalorian” spinoff show, with her mixed martial arts career even further behind her.
In actual 2026, Carano is on the verge of her first MMA fight in nearly 17 years as she prepares to meet former UFC champion Ronda Rousey in the headliner of a Netflix live-streamed event May 16 at Intuit Dome in Inglewood, Calif. Why the alternate reality didn’t get a chance to play out for Carano – and a big reason why she’s fighting Rousey – is because of, in her own words, the “cancellation” she experienced.
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Back in 2021, while she played the role of Cara Dune on the popular Disney+ series from the “Star Wars” universe, “The Mandalorian,” Carano came under fire a social media post in which she likened the experience of Republicans in the U.S. to Jews in Nazi Germany. Those remarks came on the heels of other online posts in which Carano mocked transgender rights and gender pronoun preference, criticized vaccines and mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic, and questioned the validity of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Carano was swiftly removed from “The Mandalorian” by Lucasfilm, which produced the show, and it essentially signaled the end of her acting career. Carano later filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against Disney and Lucasfilm, which reached a settlement in August 2025.
What Gina Carano has to say about controversy now
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – NOVEMBER 13: Pedro Pascal and Gina Carano arrive at the premiere of Lucasfilm’s first-ever, live-action series, “The Mandalorian,” at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, Calif. on November 13, 2019. “The Mandalorian” streams exclusively on Disney+. (Photo by Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney)
With her fight against Rousey just over a month away, Carano appeared Wednesday on “The Ariel Helwani Show” and opened up on the impact of that tumultuous period of her life.
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“It’s like somebody pulls the rug out from under you, you fall, and you break your neck,” Carano said. “You really see who people truly are to you at that moment. You see people not call, and you see strange people call, usually people who have been through something similar, a certain amount of hate, and they reach out because of empathy or something.
“It’s a very hard thing. … I had so much anxiety in my body that my face hurt. Like, my skin hurt me. I don’t know if anybody’s had that – it hurt so bad. My soul was just crushed. My heart was broken. I felt like there was such injustice in what happened, and it was kind of just so harsh. But it did teach me about the world and about people and about mobs, propaganda, and how people can be so easily manipulated to hate someone you don’t even know.”
Gina Carano: MMA ‘saving my life again’
Carano’s acting career took off shortly after her last MMA fight against Cris Cyrbog on Aug. 5, 2009, with appearances in action movies such as “Haywire” (2011), “Fast & Furious 6” (2013) and “Deadpool” (2016), among other film and television roles, before her first big break on “The Mandalorian” (2019).
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From her personal experience since the Rousey fight was announced, a lot of casual folks outside the combat sports world don’t realize Carano’s original claim to fame was as a pioneer of women’s MMA and the sport’s first mainstream star.
“I got to that point where everyone is like, ‘Wait, the actress is fighting Ronda?'” Carano said. “I’ve worked my whole life to become an actress after fighting, right? And now I’m going back to fighting.”
And that is something Carano seems to be at peace with.
“I’m happy to have had it lead me here, because I’m doing this thing that saved my life in the beginning, and now it’s saving my life again,” Carano said. “It’s fresh, it’s exciting, it’s groundbreaking, and I feel like I just had to get back to who I am. And this is where it started.”
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This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: Gina Carano on ‘Mandalorian’ firing 5 years later: ‘It hurt so bad’
