Regardless of controversy, Emilia Pérez is a bad movie

When the lead’s racist tweets were exposed, she was swiftly dropped by Netflix and her co-stars. But, Clarisse Loughrey says, the issue is why the film was so lauded in the first place

- Clarisse Loughrey

The Oscars are two weeks away. Normally, we'd be watching glamorously attired insiders feverishly compare predictions, their noses pressed up against screens as they watch the Baftas, Screen Actors Guild Awards, and other various pit stops leading up to the moment an industry veteran rips open an envelope and announces our new Best Picture. But, this year, there’s one conversation, and one conversation alone, being had: how do we solve a problem like Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón?

At the end of last month, journalist Sarah Hagi unearthed a digital nuke in Gascón’s online history. Tweet after tweet from her X account, dating roughly from 2019 onwards, now all deleted, began to circulate. Each new statement seemed more atrocious than the last. Almost every kind of bigotry was wheeled out (though mostly racism – more specifically, Islamophobia).

Gascón, who pre-Emilia Pérez, had largely only starred in unremarkable parts in Spanish-speaking telenovelas, then embarked on a uniquely unsuccessful apology tour. She delivered the minimal effort, “I sincerely apologise to everyone who has been hurt along the way” statement, before sitting down with CNN en Español anchor Juan Carlos Arciniegas to insist she is “not a racist”, and that “when I have a spider in my house I put a little glass on it so as not to kill it and take it out to the street”.

This was done entirely without the involvement of the film’s distributor, Netflix. Gascón had not only tweeted the indefensible and failed to take responsibility for it – she’d also gone rogue.

Netflix’s reaction was, essentially, complete severance. Gascón’s name and face were swiftly erased from the distributor’s “For Your Consideration” campaign adverts. According to