It was more than a decade ago, in a hallway near an arena, when Gina Carano met Ronda Rousey for the first time.
Carano was wearing big blue heels — she remembers them clearly — as she made her way to the ringside seats. Rossi was an Olympic judoka with a few professional fights and a name that no one really knew yet.
She walked over with what Carano now describes as a “sly smile,” looked into her eyes and said, “You’re not that big.” Carano looked in his heels at Rousey and said, “Hi Ronda.”
That was the introduction. They never fought. Rousey became the most famous woman in the history of mixed martial arts, winning and losing the UFC bantamweight title, retiring, joining WWE, and retiring again.
Meanwhile, Carano went the other way: I made it foolishby Steven Soderbergh, A Fast and furious Sequel, and then, in 2019, he joined The Mandalorian As Cara Dune, a New Republic shock trooper who was supposed to establish her own role, Rangers of the New Republic.
In February 2021, Lucasfilm allowed her to stalk a series of social media posts — including a Twitter bio captioned “beep/bop/boop,” added shortly after her star Pedro Pascal put “he/him” in his post, and an Instagram post comparing the contemporary American climate of conservatives to that of Jews in Nazi Germany.
The studio described the posts as “abhorrent and unacceptable,” and said they defamed people “on the basis of their cultural and religious identities.” The spin-off has been cancelled. Cara Dune was written.
Three years later, with the support of Elon Musk, Carano filed a lawsuit against The Walt Disney Company for wrongful termination of the company. The lawsuit was settled last August, with a statement from Disney that had a markedly different tone compared to the harsh dismissal announcement that preceded it.
“With the conclusion of this lawsuit, we look forward to identifying opportunities to work with Ms. Carano in the near future,” the statement attributed to a Lucasfilm spokesperson said. “Ms. Carano has always been highly respected by her directors, co-stars and staff, and has worked hard to perfect her craft while treating her colleagues with kindness and respect.”
With the suit behind her, Carano’s next step is not in the acting arena but in the ring. She finds herself set to fight Rousey in Los Angeles at the Intuit Dome on May 16 – which will mark the first step into MMA from Most Valuable Promotions, the company founded in 2021 by Jake Paul and Nakisa Bedarian.
After that the only entrance A decade ago, neither woman would see each other again until the buildup to this fight began. In the months that followed, they stood across from each other again and again, in press conferences and in the determined stares that the modern fight calendar demands.
In each of them, Carano says, Rosie looked up and said, in some variation, the same thing: “You’re really not that big.”
Carano laughs as she relays this in a recent phone conversation. She is, by her own measurement, two inches taller than Rossi, and towers over her by an unspecified amount. “I’m still bigger than you,” was her response.
Carano is 43 years old. Rosie, 39 years old. Carano lives in Las Vegas, where she has been training for the past six months outside of a combat gym. She said older men and teenagers would stop her between rounds to tell her she looked emaciated.
It’s been a huge transformation. In September 2024, about six months after I last sat down with her Hollywood Reporter —She was, by her own account, pre-diabetic, depressed, and physically unable to walk long distances without pain.
“I was in a terrible state, physically and a bit emotionally,” she says. “I kind of lost my way and was depressed.”
In late January of this year, I participated in a Zoom session The Mandalorian Creator Jon Favreau and Lucasfilm Creative Director Dave Filoni. I mentioned it on a podcast, and the phrase — “Gina Carano talks to Jon Favreau” — was picked up and used in blogs and social media to suggest either Cara Dune was coming back or that no such thing was being discussed.
“I think it was, ‘Let’s reach out to the base,'” Carano says of the conversation. “Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni were two people I’ve always respected, and we went through a couple of seasons together, and we had a great relationship. And even through everything that was going on, Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau were never the villains to me.”
She did not reveal whether the conversation touched on the possibility of returning to the country star wars.
“I’m not really going to reveal any of that, but I will say that for me, it was an important conversation. For Zoom, to see each other, to fix anything, to make sure everyone was OK. And everyone was OK,” she says.
She did not tell them about the upcoming fight. News about her has not broken yet. She says she found herself thinking, during and after the call, that she hoped it was Favreau The Mandalorian and Grogu — the feature film he’s directing, set in the universe she was once a part of and opening May 22 — did well at the box office.
“It was directed by Jon Favreau, who is a good man,” she says. “He’s a great storyteller. He’s a great artist. And I would really love to see all this unrest within the world.” star wars A type of fandom that has come to an end. “It’s like it’s a war that never ends.”
unrest inside star wars Fandom, in Carano’s telling, is a microcosm of a broader malady. She says there are “two extreme sides” — one “really tried to cancel my job, and succeeded,” and the other reacts to the first side.
She says she believes the culture of anger is simmering. She did not say whether she stands by the social media posts that ended her candidacy The MandalorianI did not ask her to reconsider them. (In previous interviews, she has refused to apologize for it, while calling the Holocaust comparison misread.)
The settlement with Disney is bound by confidentiality. When asked if she was paid as part of this settlement, she responded, “I can’t talk about the details of the settlement. I can’t talk about anything related to it.”
What she was going to talk about, at length, was one sentence in the statement Disney released in August: the sentence about how she had “always been held in high regard by her directors, co-stars, and staff,” and that Disney looked forward to “identifying opportunities to work together.”
She reads the line over the phone.
“No one really picked up on it,” she says. “But this is a marked contrast to that first horrific statement they issued years ago. I don’t recall Disney doing that much at the time. This speaks volumes about the leagues.”
She suspects the press prefers grievance to reconciliation and insists she holds no grudges.
“I love peace,” she says. “When all parties are happy, we can move forward,” from a chapter of her life she refers to as “a very tough education.”
Her relationship with Pedro Pascal, her former co-star, was one of the casualties of that period. Pascal, who did not publicly denounce her during her firing, was, she previously said, the cast member who had quietly urged her, in the months prior, to quiet her critics — to say what the online mob wanted to hear.
She says the last time the two spoke was when their colleague Carl Weathers died in February 2024.
“But no,” she explains. “Pedro and I don’t keep in touch.”
When asked about Kathleen Kennedy, who left her position as president of Lucasfilm, Carano said: “I wish her the best.” She adds that she hopes Kennedy will one day write a book or be the subject of a documentary: “You never know what someone else is going through.”
The fight itself, against Rousey, is something Carano seems careful not to over-explain. This is something that has been identified or the last six months. She explains that the appeal of fighting, as opposed to acting or acting, lies in its honesty: “The opponent you’re training is right in front of you. You know what their intentions are, and they know your intentions.”
In the years I’ve been away from the ring, professional fighting has changed. She was worried, before starting this camp, that she wouldn’t “fit in anymore in the fighting world” because… “Almost everyone has to be like a WWE character now.”
I was primed, in particular, for Rousey to play a villainous role – to provide the villain role that the construction machine, in 2026, seems to require for any fight worth selling.
Personality not achieved.
Rosie, according to Carano, was frank, even warm, in press conferences; She has, to Carano’s knowledge, never performed in front of cameras.
“I wasn’t sure how she was going to stand up for me or talk to me,” Carano says. “It was refreshing. It was very refreshing.”
Carano is planning her next moves after the fight. She has a new manager, who is also a producer, who, she says, “showed up when I needed him.”
She says there are projects under development. 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 and Favreau Zoom statement indicates that the door is not closed. For now, at least, she’s been out for three weeks.
“I came back from pre-diabetes, in terrible shape, to being an athlete again,” she says with confidence and wit. “And to do that in a year and a half, there were so many different levels to it.” She mentioned in passing that Rousey only wanted one fight, and that the fight Rousey wanted was hers.
“I embrace this opportunity,” she says. “It was truly one of the hardest but healthiest things I’ve ever done for myself.”
