Netflix is standing behind “Emilia Pérez” despite the fog of controversy that has engulfed its principal star, Karla Sofía Gascón.
Appearing Thursday on “The Town” podcast, Netflix Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria publicly addressed the scandal for the first time.
“It’s really a bummer for 100 very incredibly talented people who made an amazing movie,” Bajaria said. “If you look at the nominations and all of these sort of awards that it’s received, I think it’s such a bummer that it’s distracted from that.”
Until recently, “Emilia Pérez” looked poised to be an awards season juggernaut for Netflix, which scooped up the film for a reported $12 million after it premiered to great acclaim at France’s Cannes Film Festival in May.
Directed by Jacques Audiard, the musical crime caper follows a Mexican cartel leader (played by Gascón) who enlists the help of an attorney (Zoe Saldaña), to undergo gender affirmation surgery. After living as her true self for some time, the character seeks out a reunion with her grieving wife (Selena Gomez), who assumed her spouse had died, and their children.
Though “Emilia Pérez” faced criticism from some Mexican critics as well as members of the transgender community early on, the film picked up four Golden Globe awards, including Best Motion Picture ― Musical or Comedy. It also became an Academy Awards frontrunner, nabbing 13 nominations. Among them was a historic nod for Gascón, who became the first openly transgender woman to be nominated for the Best Actress Oscar.
But Gascón soon found herself at the epicenter of not one, but two, media firestorms. First, she raised concerns about violating the Academy’s promotional campaign rules when she accused fellow Oscar nominee Fernanda Torres’ team of “speaking badly about me and ‘Emilia Pérez,’” per an interview with Brazilian outlet Folha de S. Paulo.
Just days later, a series of years-old X (formerly Twitter) posts from Gascón’s account resurfaced in which she expressed incendiary views about Muslims, Jews, George Floyd and Oscars diversity, among other topics.
Gascón apologized for both the accusations she leveled at Torres as well as her controversial social media posts, later deactivating her X account altogether. But the damage had been done, with Netflix quietly removing her from its publicity materials. Saldaña, considered by many to be the Oscars frontrunner in the Best Supporting Actress category, and Gomez have both since addressed their costar’s remarks, while not mentioning her by name.
Go Ad-Free — And Protect The Free Press
Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.
Though the chances of “Emilia Pérez” winning at the Oscars next month have dimmed, Bajaria nonetheless praised the “incredible campaign” Netflix ran in terms of promoting the film and suggested the streaming platform would be “reevaluating” the process of vetting the social media presence of its actors and creators moving forward.
“If you ask me today, everything I know, we would still buy the movie today,” she said Thursday. “That movie is incredible and it’s creative and it’s bold — that’s what you want, you want to take those big swings.”
Listen to Bela Bajaria’s “The Town” interview here. Her comments on “Emilia Pérez” start around the 4:31 mark.
