Gina Carano: The Comeback Queen

This is a comeback story, but it could've just as easily been a cautionary tale. When I sit down with Carano, she's less than three weeks out from one of the most anticipated fights in women's combat sports history, leaner than she's been in years, sharper in every sense, and positively glowing. 

The End Or The Beginning?

In early 2021, at the peak of the cancel culture era, Disney fired Carano from her acclaimed role as Cara Dune on The Mandalorian after she criticized tyrannical COVID lockdown restrictions on social media. The outrage machine descended immediately and Lucasfilm released a statement calling her posts "abhorrent" and confirming she would not be returning to the franchise. For a woman who had spent her life building something extraordinary, first as a trailblazing MMA fighter who helped open the door for an entire generation of female athletes and then as an actress carving out a rare niche in Hollywood action, it was meant to be a finishing blow. It almost was.

She told me what followed were some of the darkest years of her life. She sold her home in Hermosa Beach, got an RV, and drove. The work dried up. The people she thought would call mostly didn't. The stress piled onto her body in ways she could eventually see in her bloodwork: pre-diabetic levels, cortisol through the roof, a body quietly staging a revolt. "2024 was not looking so good," she tells me. "The depression, and kind of just completely lost. Like, what am I supposed to do? I'm trying my hardest, but nothing's working. I'm in the desert. The questions I was asking were questions other people were wanting to ask. We got to the point where we couldn't ask, and that was a really scary time."

The surprising turning point came through a naturopath in Montana who did something simple: she took Carano's blood work and actually showed her what was happening inside her body. The results were a map of the last few years. "It was pre-diabetic. The cortisol and it was all these horrific things," she says. "She showed me what was going on in my body." After years of her body bearing the full weight of the stress and the loss and the uncertainty, someone finally looking underneath the surface was exactly what it took to start healing.

Another surprise followed. In October 2024, Elon Musk's legal team came calling. In February 2025, she filed suit against Disney. By August 2025, the case had settled, and what happened next is the part that still seems to delight and baffle her in equal measure. Disney released a statement unlike anything she said the company had ever put out before, one that acknowledged her work, her professionalism, and the respect of her directors and co-stars. "Nobody covers this," she says, bemused. "I told this to The Hollywood Reporter journalist and they were like, yeah, nobody's covering this. But if you put the two statements Disney made next to each other, what they said when they fired me and what they said at the settlement, the contrast is just mind-blowing."

Batting A Hundred

When Carano talks about the years that cost her so much, there's no bitterness. She has done the interior work of processing it, and the result is a woman who can speak about one of the most painful chapters of her life without being consumed by it.

She is also, it has to be said, someone who feels vindicated. "Back then it was called conspiracy theories," she says with a laugh. "And I'm like, with my conspiracies, I'm batting a hundred right now." What she was asking, she insists, was never as radical as the reaction made it seem. "The questions I was asking were questions other people were wanting to ask. We got to the point where we couldn't even ask, you know, or counter the narrative, or even make a joke. Comedians suffered for it. People just stated facts that people didn't like." She shakes her head. "That was a wild time. It was not that long ago."

The cultural reckoning with that era, she thinks, is still playing out in ways people don't want to acknowledge. "I think a lot of people now are taking on big causes because they have shame about how they acted during that time," she says. "They don't want to talk about who they became during those years. So they're like, no, no, we're really good people, look at us sticking up for this and this." She lets that sit for a moment. "People want to act like it didn't happen. But it did. And I feel pretty clean-hearted, because I feel good about what I did."

She also points out a pattern she found herself unable to ignore. "Sex discrimination in Hollywood is sadly a real thing, because I've seen a lot of women lose their jobs. Even women I didn't agree with."

"The internet always wants you to be involved in its problem whether it has anything to do with you or not."

As for the people she worked with most closely on The Mandalorian, the ones the internet seemed determined to cast as her adversaries, she is clear. "I never had a problem with Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau. I thought they were always wonderful. There's a lot of stuff I can't even share. But those are two good human beings that I respect, and they respect me." She gives a small shrug at the outrage this tends to generate online. "The internet always wants you to be involved in its problem whether it has anything to do with you or not."

It's a posture, she admits, that not everyone understands. But it's consistent with how she's carried the whole chapter. "I do have pain in my heart for people I lost during that time, people I still think deserve justice and I pray for that. But as far as how people were toward me, I'm not good at holding grudges."

The Harder Thing

Her legal victory is a satisfying ending to one chapter, but Carano has never been someone who sits still for very long. She's already working towards another win. But before we get into her much-anticipated fight with Ronda Rousey on May 16th (which will be streamed live on Netflix, the platform’s first-ever MMA event), we have to talk about the physical transformation Carano has undergone, first, because it's incredible and, second, because it's inseparable from everything else.

"I was hiding from the world for a long time."

Since September 2024, she has lost a significant amount of weight that she won't share just yet, saving it for what will clearly be a dramatic reveal. "People are going to be like, I didn't know she was that heavy," she says with a laugh. "It's going to be a little embarrassing. But life is embarrassing; might as well just lean in." For years she had been showing up to fan expos in strategic layers, furry ponchos and boots and a hat, wearing it all so the cameras couldn't quite catch her. "I was hiding from the world for a long time."

She has her own thoughts on the body positivity conversation. "I do believe there should be all sorts of different sizes that are beautiful," she says. "But here's the thing: what is ultimately beautiful is what is healthy." Then, after a beat: "Food is one of the most abused drugs. People use it to hide from the world. And I think a lot of the people who use food, like I did, they're actually taking it out on themselves because they don't want to take it out on others. They're usually very sensitive people."

She's also honest about the seduction of shortcuts. "I thought about just going and getting that procedure that suctions the fat and forms your body," she admits with a laugh. "But I knew it wasn't going to teach me what I needed to be taught. If you don't learn how to take care of yourself, you're just going to end up back in a bad place." So instead, she did the harder thing, in the form of a full professional fight camp.

"Every morning I wake up at three in the morning, and I'm thinking about this fight," she says. "You have to get up every morning. You have to train, you have to do the things that are hard. You have to diet. You have zero life." She even turned down acting work to be here. Everything else is by the wayside. "But I would have never gotten where I'm at now without this."

The result is a woman in film shape, in fight shape, and by her own account in better shape mentally and physically than she has been in years. "This fight is pure passion," she says. "It made me dig really deep, deeper than I would have ever." A stepping stone, she calls it, back to the thing she really isn't finished with yet. "The ultimate goal is to get back to storytelling, which I think has a longer lifespan. It's also so powerful and it's something that I feel like I've got unfinished business and I haven't even tapped into my potential there."

Before Hollywood Knew Her Name

Most people know Carano from The Mandalorian, or from the lawsuit, or from the wave of renewed attention that comes with a comeback this dramatic. Fewer know the origin story, and they should, because it's a good one.

She grew up as the athletic middle child in a family where her sisters were the prom queens. "I was more like, really good at sports and activities," she says with a self-deprecating smile. "I didn't bloom." At nineteen she was in Las Vegas, partying hard, aimless, grieving friends lost to overdoses and violence. "One of my friends got taken out and shot in the head in the desert. Another got stabbed thirty-one times by somebody else I knew. We were in a really tough environment."

One person who helped pull her out of that environment was a young man named Kevin. He decided to honor a friend who had died of heart failure by signing up for Muay Thai, and three months later Gina walked into the same gym. Six months after that, they were both fighting in small, scrappy venues. She was a natural from the start. "It's hard to explain, but as soon as I started really excelling, people just started putting a camera on me," she says. "I was just doing something that was keeping me away from drugs and alcohol. But my career took off into acting, and he kept going into fighting." She and Kevin went their separate ways for a time, each chasing something different.

At the time Carano entered the sport, there was essentially no women's MMA scene to speak of. No female roster in the UFC, no big paydays, no roadmap to success. "It was literally just me doing something I was passionate about that kept me on the straight and narrow," she says. "It garnered a lot of inspiration and attention. And then I caught the eye of Ronda Rousey, and she became who she became." Rousey has credited Carano for opening the door for female fighters to be seen as entertainers and not just athletes, just in time for Rousey to walk through it.

What set Carano apart during that era wasn't only her ability to win fights, but also that she refused to adopt the aesthetic common to women in combat sports, the toughened-up, masculine presentation she'd watched female athletes default to throughout her life. She made a conscious choice from day one to stay fully herself: feminine, glamorous, and absolutely dangerous. "You can still be a female and love all the things and be feminine," she says. "It's actually adorable. Women are powerful. They don't have to be like men to be powerful." She changed the visual language of the sport by simply being herself.

"Women are powerful. They don't have to be like men to be powerful."

As for acting, she never planned it. People dropped comments here and there, but she didn't have an agent angling for Hollywood. "If that's going to happen, somebody is going to come find me and give me a job. That's how it's going to happen." The person who came was filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, one week after her fight with Cyborg, while she was still licking her wounds. He reached out to her seemingly out of the blue.

"My mom was so cute, she was like, honey, do you want me to drive you? You know how directors can be. And I was like, Mom, come on, I'm fine." She laughs. "I'm a fighter. I can take care of myself."

That fateful meeting was the beginning of one kind of life, and the end of another. Days in the gym, small venues, and the version of herself that had walked in at nineteen with nothing to lose was receding in the rearview mirror. Kevin stayed in the world she was leaving. And for a time, that distance was just something they both lived with until fate had other plans.

A Decade In The Making

Now, on the other side of careers that neither Carano nor Rousey could have fully predicted, they finally meet. Most people expected the signature Rousey they knew: the trash talk, the scowl, the psychological warfare, but instead we've seen a much sweeter version of Rousey, asking for Carano's autograph and singing her praises. "She created her controversy with other people but with me, she's just been excited," Carano explains. "I think she's enjoyed the training process more, sharing the ring with someone she genuinely wanted to fight." She pauses. "And so have I."

"It's got a pleasant energy to it," Carano says, "because it's something that neither one of us needed to do, but want to. That's a totally different animal." No bills to pay, no rankings to chase. Just two legends who want this, on their own terms, for their own reasons.

"It's something that neither one of us needed to do, but want to."

For Carano specifically, the fight is one final, definitive statement. She had, she says, given up on fighting five years ago. She thought she'd closed that door for good. "Fighting just gets in you, and unless you get it all out of your system, it'll stick in there," she says. "It did stick in there until five years ago. And then I thought I hard-closed the door and was enjoying The Mandalorian and I was like, okay, this is awesome." And then life had other plans. "You just never know what's going to happen."

The Man Who Didn't Blink

If time found a way to finally bring us the fight that never was, it also found a way to bring Gina and Kevin back to each other for good. When I ask about him, her whole face changes. "I've known him since I was 19. He's my first love. And I'm just as in love with him now, if not a hundred times more."

He was by her side when the Disney blowup happened in 2021, and Carano says he didn't hesitate. "He didn't blink. He already understood the world," she says. "I was naive when all this stuff was going down. But Kevin was locked in." The paparazzi and stalkers were outside their Hermosa Beach home, so they sold the house, got the RV, and drove. Over the course of their relationship, he proposed four times, but Carano kept redirecting. "Wait, I don't like how you did it. Try again. Surprise me next time." She shakes her head telling the story. "I was all over the place." They had set January 1, 2022 as a kind of deadline, a date to make a decision. When the morning came, he said he already knew his answer. "And I was like, okay. Let's do this."

There was no ceremony, just the courthouse and a bright pink dress, black army boots, and their own invented last name, chosen together. "He wasn't attached to his name for reasons," she says. "And I didn't want him taking mine. So we made up a name." She pauses. "I didn't realize he needed that commitment. And I didn't realize I needed it either. It was the best decision I've ever made."

Kevin is also an artist, a caricaturist with a particular gift for capturing not just the unique character of every face but also what’s under the surface. And she’ll tell you that it was learning to truly see each other fully, including the hard years and the wrong turns, that finally made it work. "The trick was, I think, we had to forgive each other for the years in between," she says. "We're not throwing anything in each other's faces moving onward. We're going to forgive each other for what we've done and start a new life. And it really has been like a clean slate."

Unfinished Business 

You could talk to Carano for hours, and I honestly wanted to, but she has a fight to prepare for, press conferences, and projects in the works that aren't ready for the spotlight just yet, so we start to wind down. She told me after the weigh-in comes the cheeseburger she's been dreaming about since fight camp started, and after that another story begins.

She already knows what it looks like. "I want to act again, then direct. I feel like I've been a part of the biggest and the smallest productions and I see where people go wrong and where they go right," she says. "The hardest part is finding a story you're going to be able to live with for years. Like this fight, I'm creating a painting. At some point the fight is going to come and I'm going to have to leave the canvas, and it's going to have to sit there. I'm going to have to write it myself. More than likely."

Our conversation eventually finds its way to the iconic Rocky movie, and of course she's a fan. She says she plans to watch it before her fight. The symmetry is almost too good. The fighter who became an actress who wants to become a director, drawing inspiration from the man who wrote and directed the defining film about getting back up after you’ve been knocked down. 

When I ask her what has kept her grounded through all of it—the fight, the lawsuit, the comeback—the answer comes easily. "I check in with God all the time," she says. "I don't necessarily pray for victory. I just pray that His will be done through this process. I feel like I'm where I'm supposed to be, which gives me freedom and confidence going into this very hard thing. He has got my back no matter what."

"This is the best I've ever felt."

There is a particular kind of freedom in that kind of faith, the freedom to walk into hard things without needing to control how they turn out. She has fought for that freedom in every sense of the word. And when I ask her simply how she feels, standing on this side of all of it, she doesn't miss a beat.

"I feel like I'm blooming now. I love this age. I have a husband. I have goals. This is the best I've ever felt."