Embattled Emilia Peréz star and Oscar nominee Karla Sofía Gascón appeared in an hour-long, unauthorized CNN en Español interview Sunday morning, in which she broke down in tears and ranted at various points about her resurfaced racist and Islamophobic tweets.
Initially reiterating many of the same points in her Instagram apology posted yesterday, Gascón reiterated that she is “not racist” and offered her “most sincere apologies to all the people who may have felt offended for the way I express myself in my past, in my present and in my future.”
She continued later: “I believe I have been judged, I have been convicted and sacrificed and crucified and stoned without a trial and without the option to defend myself.”
Deadline has confirmed that Netflix was not involved in setting up the CNN interview and was not aware it was taking place.
In an interview that jumped around topics considerably, with interviewer Juan Carlos Arciniegas often unable to get a word in, Gascón discussed her “marvelous daughter” who she said has taught her “important values” and that she relates to the struggle of Black people.
“I feel and very much identify with the people who were thrown off buses for the color of their skin, with the people who did not want them to study at university, for the people who were hated simply for existing, like how I am hated in this moment,” she said.
Gascón occasionally broke down in tears, citing a “relationship with a wonderful woman who is a Muslim who has taught her about respect and to understand perhaps better than in the past.” She later said she has been “100%” supported by her at this moment.
At another point, Gascón brought up her brother who died when she was 20: “When I was very little, my brother died in an accident on Christmas, and I have always held a resentment toward human beings of all spectrums because it seems to me that human beings are something deplorable but something in which I have incredible hope.”
She went on to say that she has always received hate, for example for wearing earrings or a skirt, and being called anti-gay slurs for being trans. Additionally, she said she has faced hatred from some people in Mexico for being Spanish, claiming they called her a “Spanish woman who came again to rob them of gold.”
Later, Gascón referenced the 2004 Madrid train bombings, which she said left a mark on her: “It affected me to see two days before some people praying inside the train who were very similar to the people who later carried out these attacks.”
Amid tears, she said also: “I have not stopped receiving hate, death threats, insults, abuses. I have not seen anyone who has come out, in any media, any space, any place, raise their hand for me and say, ‘Hey, what is happening with this person who you are massacring?’ And no one, no one has lifted a single finger for change.”
When asked about her tweet in which she deemed George Floyd, who was murdered at the hands of police in 2020, a “drug addict and a hustler,” Gascón responded that she did pen the post and has treated social media as “unfortunately more like a diary” filled with “reflections rather than like something that can influence someone because before being here my post was viewed by three people.”
The actress, who made history as the first openly trans woman nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars, went on to say that she relies heavily on “irony, sarcasm and at times exaggeration and of course I use a resource to talk in third person, like if what I write was written by someone who thinks in a negative manner.” Gascón added that she is the “obviously” a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, and claims she wrote the tweet in order to point out others’ racist commentary.
Gascón acknowledged that her tweet about the 93rd Oscars, in which she deemed Daniel Kaluuya’s and Yuh-Jung Youn’s respective wins as indicative of an “Afro-Korean festival,” as a “stupidity” and “surely they deserved those awards for all of their work and not for who they are.”
Arciniegas then asked Gascón to address a tweet she wrote that read, “This is the same as always: ‘Black slaves and the woman in the kitchen’. But this is my opinion and it must be respected. I do not understand so much world war against Hitler, he simply had his opinion of the Jews. The end, that’s how the world goes.” In response, Gascón said she was once again using “third person, as if I were a Nazi.”
Gascón added that, with her tweets about Floyd, Muslims and Hitler taken together, “it appears that this is a terrible and evil person, when precisely I am intending to reflect the opposite.”
At another point, Gascón also debunked a circulated tweet in which she seemed to call co-star Selena Gomez a “rich rat” as fabricated, and that she has “never said anything about my colleague.”
“I said, ‘Well, but what have I done in my life? What have I done — if I have not killed a mosquito, that when I go to places and I have a spider in my house, I put it in a cup to not kill it and take it out to the street?” she said in tears, saying that the response to the controversy has made her feel as if she has committed a “crime.”
Watch the interview, in Spanish, below:
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