Dasha Nekrasova should be in Utah right now, filming the psychological thriller Iconoclast. She had “a fairly small role,” she tells me—the movie is about a man who becomes obsessed with an internet streamer and loses his mind—but still, she’s bummed.
The 34-year-old actor and podcast host had her contract rescinded last Friday. The same day, she got a call from her talent agency, Gersh, who told her that they were dropping her, and that she should probably hire a crisis publicist. “It felt like there were a lot of people who didn’t want to get in trouble,” she tells me, describing the experience as “Kafkaesque.”
Like in Iconoclast, there’s an online streamer that haunts this story. Last month, Red Scare had the white nationalist and antisemite Nick Fuentes on for a two-and-a-half-hour conversation. “He has his trust issues,” Dasha tells me of Fuentes. “I thought maybe we could break through—not fix him, but I thought we’d be friends.” The show went up, to little fanfare—until Tucker Carlson hosted Fuentes on his show more recently, causing a cataclysm on the right. A lot of mainstream outlets started paying attention to Fuentes. Then, Dasha got dropped.
