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Melisa Barrera, an actress from Scream 7 has been fired from the movie over her pro-Palestinian social media posts.
The former Scream actress shed light on the Palestine-Israel conflict and said that silence was not an option for her when confronting injustice. After her statement went viral, the actress was reportedly removed from the Scream franchise for her pro-Palestine views.
The actress joined the slasher film franchise in 2022 as lead Sam Carpenter, the estranged older sister of Jenna Ortega’s Tara Carpenter. She reprised her role in the sequel Scream 6 and was slated to reprise the role once more in the forthcoming Scream 7, until Variety reported on November 21, 2023, that Spyglass Media Group, the company behind Scream, had dropped her from the cast.
In this regard, Spyglass Media Group spokesperson claimed that it wasn’t the actor’s support of Palestine that caused her ultimate firing but the fact that her posts could be interpreted as antisemitic.
For Spyglass, the agency has zero tolerance for antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form. One of Barrera’s said posts, which was reportedly uploaded to her Instagram Stories, reads as follows: “Gaza is currently being treated like a concentration camp. Cornering everyone together, with no where [sic] to go, no electricity no water … People have learnt nothing from our histories. And just like our histories, people are still silently watching it all happen. THIS IS GENOCIDE & ETHNIC CLEANSING.”
After her exit, Barrera shared a post to her stories that read: “At the end of the day, I’d rather be excluded for who I include than be included for who I exclude.” However, many news outlets have reached out to both Barrera’s former publicists and a manager for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
Scream 7 director Christopher Landon, who’s set to take over from Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett for the upcoming installment, also weighed in on Barrera’s removal from the cast with a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “This is my statement: 💔 Everything sucks. Stop yelling. This was not my decision to make,” Landon wrote in the since-deleted post.
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Barrera is not the only one in Hollywood who has been cut from a project or has faced backlash or termination in the workplace following their pro-Palestinian comments. Last month, Maha Dakhil, one of CAA’s top talent agents, also faced backlash and almost lost her job after referring to the conflict as “a genocide.”
