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Actors Who Ruined Their Careers On Social Media

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One tweet, one Instagram Live, one leaked DM — that’s all it took to end careers that took decades to build.

Social media gave actors direct access to millions of fans, but it also gave millions of fans direct access to actors at their worst. From a racist 2 a.m. tweet to a livestream nobody was supposed to see, the last few years have shown just how fast a single post can undo a career built over 20 or 30 years. Here’s how it happened to some of the biggest names in Hollywood.

• Roseanne Barr’s May 2018 tweet comparing former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to an ape got her hit sitcom reboot canceled by ABC within hours of the post going up.
• Gina Carano was dropped by Lucasfilm and dumped by her own talent agency, UTA, in February 2021 after comparing today’s political divisions to the Holocaust.
• Vanessa Hudgens had to publicly apologize after telling followers on an Instagram Live in March 2020 that COVID-19 deaths were “inevitable” and pandemic precautions were “a bunch of bullshit.”

Roseanne Barr’s Same-Day Cancellation

Barr’s sitcom revival was one of the biggest ratings stories of 2018, pulling in more than 18 million viewers for its premiere and giving ABC its most-watched comeback in years. Then, on May 29, 2018, Barr tweeted that Jarrett was the product of the “Muslim brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.” ABC’s president, Channing Dungey, called the tweet “abhorrent” and canceled the show that same day, an almost unheard-of speed for a network killing a hit. Barr later blamed the tweet partly on Ambien, but the sleep-aid maker’s parent company, Sanofi, publicly shot that down, tweeting that “racism is not a known side effect.”

Gina Carano And The Studio That Cut Her Loose

Carano played Cara Dune on Disney+’s “The Mandalorian” for two seasons before a string of Instagram posts caught up with her. The final straw came when she compared being a conservative in America today to being a Jew during the Holocaust. Lucasfilm confirmed in February 2021 that she was “not currently employed” by the studio and had no future plans with her, and UTA dropped her as a client the same week — a rare instance of both the studio and the agency severing ties simultaneously.

Vanessa Hudgens’ Livestream Damage Control

Not every career-damaging moment involves a tweet someone dug up years later — sometimes it’s live and in real time. During a March 2020 Instagram Live, as California was days from its first stay-at-home order, Hudgens told followers, “Even if everybody gets it, like, yeah, people are going to die, which is terrible, but, like, inevitable?” The backlash was immediate, and she issued an apology within hours, saying her comments were “insensitive” during a moment of genuine public fear.

Armie Hammer’s Leaked Direct Messages

Hammer’s fall was arguably the most abrupt of the bunch. In January 2021, screenshots purportedly showing his direct messages — graphic and violent BDSM and cannibalism-themed fantasies — spread across social media, and within days he was dropped from multiple projects, including the Jennifer Lopez film “Shotgun Wedding.” No tweet, no public statement from Hammer himself triggered the collapse; the damage came entirely from private messages made public.

“Even if everybody gets it, like, yeah, people are going to die, which is terrible, but, like, inevitable?” — Vanessa Hudgens, Instagram Live, March 2020

James Gunn And Kevin Hart’s Old Tweets Resurface

Sometimes the tweet that ends a job wasn’t written yesterday. Disney fired James Gunn from “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” in July 2018 after right-wing activists resurfaced years-old jokes he’d made about rape and pedophilia; he was eventually rehired the following year and went on to direct “The Suicide Squad” for rival studio Warner Bros. Kevin Hart faced a similar reckoning in December 2018, stepping down as Oscars host just one day after being announced when old homophobic tweets resurfaced — he initially refused to apologize, then relented once the backlash didn’t fade. Both cases show how the internet’s memory outlasts a star’s own attempt to move on, a pattern that’s shown up again and again in stories about media figures undone by their own old posts.

What ties Barr, Carano, Hudgens and Hammer together isn’t the platform — it’s the speed. ABC needed hours to cancel “Roseanne,” Lucasfilm needed a week to cut Carano loose, and Hammer lost his next film almost as fast as the screenshots could be screenshotted again. For a longer rundown of just how often this kept happening through 2021, the fallout keeps piling up in the year’s other controversial celebrity moments — proof that the delete button came a few seconds too late for all of them.