Netflix Content Head Still Supports ‘Emilia Pérez’ Despite ‘Bummer’ Karla Sofía Gascón Tweets
Marcus Jones
After director Jacques Audiard and co-stars Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez have all shared their own reactions to the fallout surrounding Oscar-nominated “Emilia Pérez” lead Karla Sofía Gascón’s offensive tweets being unearthed, the film’s distributor Netflix has finally weighed in on the controversy through Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria appearing on the podcast “The Town with Matthew Belloni.”
“You know what I think is really a bummer for a hundred very incredibly talented people who made an amazing movie, and if you look at the nominations, and all of these sort of awards love that it’s received, I think it’s such a bummer that it’s distracted from that,” said the Netflix executive when asked for her initial reaction to Gascón’s tweets. “It really has kind of taken the conversation in a different way, except for this incredible movie that Jacques Audiard, who’s an incredible director, has made. And so to me, it really is a bummer for a lot of the people who have, like Zoe and Selena, incredible performances.”
Bajaria also gave kudos to the Awards team at Netflix, which had worked toward “Emilia Pérez” smashing the Oscar nominations record for a film not an English, with 13 nods. Previous record holders “Roma” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” only received 10. “They’ve been out there campaigning for six months, and then to have it blow up like that is really unfortunate,” she said. “Our awards team did an incredible campaign for that movie. They also just personally love it and took care of it, and it was an incredible campaign.”
Ultimately, even with how things have shaken out, Bajaria does not show any regret in Netflix acquiring “Emilia Pérez” out of Cannes 2024, after it won the Jury Prize and Best Actress for its four leading ladies. “The hardest thing is that it really does kind of detract from a movie that is so special. And if you asked me today everything I know, we would still buy the movie today,” she said. “That movie is incredible and it’s creative and it’s bold. And that’s what you want. You want to take those big swings. And so yes, there’s incredibly talented people who made that movie that, by the way, resonated with a lot of people this year.”
Even considering the backlash the film had already been getting, in terms of its quality, the Netflix officer said, “People need to get over that. It’s a creatively interesting and fun and good movie.”
Bajaria is, however, considering a change to Netflix’s policies around vetting talent’s social media, but the scale of Netflix, a global company, complicates the issue. “Are we going to actually look at people’s personal social media of the tens of thousands of people every single day around the world, of the amount of original film and TV that we make and licensing and co-pros,” she asked. “Once you kind of extrapolate it, kind of in a bigger practical sort of way, what that means — and these are people’s personal social media — but look, I think it raises a lot of sort of questions for people, like what should that process look like?”
