Melissa Barrera Dropped From ‘Scream 7’ After Referring To Gaza As A ‘Concentration Camp’ In Post

Melissa Barrera has been fired from Scream 7 after the actress shared her views on the Israel-Hamas war.

“Gaza is currently being treated like a concentration camp,” she wrote in an Instagram story. “Cornering everyone together, with nowhere to go, no electricity no water… People have learned nothing from our histories. And just like our histories, people are still silently watching it all happen. THIS IS GENOCIDE & ETHNIC CLEANSING.”

A spokesperson from Spyglass, the company behind the Scream franchise, released a statement following the news of Barrera’s removal from the film.

“Spyglass’ stance is unequivocally clear: we have zero tolerance for antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form, including false references to genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust distortion or anything that flagrantly crosses the line into hate speech.”

Barrera has been credited with revitalizing the franchise with Scream, the 2022 film that earned $137.7 million globally. She also starred in Scream 6, which earned $168.9 million globally.

The news of Barrera’s release broke the same day that actress Susan Sarandon was dropped by United Talent Agency following comments at a pro-Palestinian rally in New York.

In April 2018, Barrera sat down with uInterview exclusively to discuss the show and its message main role of Lyn in Vida, a TV series about estranged sisters reunited by the death of their mother.

In Barrera’s words, her character is a “hipster party girl that has figured out that if she seduces rich white men, she can live off of them and not have to work very hard at all.” Though this strategy may have worked for Lyn in the past, she is forced to abandon it once her mother dies and leaves behind a complicated inheritance. “What she thought that she could do — go home to the funeral and then go back to San Francisco — is not gonna happen,” Barrera told uInterview. “She’s gonna have to stay in the place that she escaped for a longer time and deal with her roots and deal with everything that she left behind.”

Though heavily centered around family, Vida contains a number of racy scenes. Barrera described filming them as “a little nerve-wracking” and admitted that when it comes to acting in the nude, “you expose yourself in more ways than just taking off your clothes.” However, she took great pride in the portrayal of female sexuality on her show. She told uInterview, “I think it’s a beautiful thing that the show is showing these women who are empowered and who have agency over their bodies and over their sexualities and showing it as being okay.”