The Bear star Ayo Edebiri has recalled receiving “insane death threats and racial slurs” after Elon Musk spread misinformation about her being cast in a “fake reboot” of Pirates of the Caribbean.
In February 2024, Musk reshared a post on X/Twitter that falsely claimed Disney was considering the 29-year-old Edebiri as a replacement for Johnny Depp in a proposed sixth instalment of the franchise.
“Disney sucks,” the X owner and tech billionaire captioned the since-deleted post.
“Just remembering when I got some of the most insane death threats and racial slurs of my life (idk if it’s the #1 moment, but for sure top 3) for a fake reboot of a movie I had never even heard of because of this man,” Edebiri wrote on her Instagram Story on Tuesday (March 11).
Sharing a screenshot of Musk’s original post, she added: “LMAO. So not only is he double s**g h**l-ing fascist, he’s an idiot but anyway. Life is, of course, a gift.”
In late 2019, Disney announced it would be moving ahead with a Pirates of the Caribbean reboot. At the time, it was not announced if Depp, who starred in all five of the previous instalments, would return for the new project.
However, in 2022, during his highly publicised defamation case against his ex-wife Amber Heard, Depp claimed that comments she made about him in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed piece had negatively impacted his career. He claimed he had been dropped from Pirates of the Caribbean six days after the op-ed was published.
Depp ultimately ended up winning the case, with Heard being ordered to pay him $10million in damages and $5 million in punitive damages. Heard was also awarded $2million in punitive damages in her countersuit against Depp.
Back in November last year, Kiera Knightley explained how the Pirates films simultaneously made her career and broke her spirit, saying: “I was seen as shit because of them, and yet because they did so well, I was given the opportunity to do the films that I ended up getting Oscar nominations for.
“They were the most successful films I’ll ever be a part of, and they were the reason that I was taken down publicly. So they’re a very confused place in my head.”