Dave Bautista defends fired Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn

Guardians of the Galaxy star Dave Bautista defended filmmaker James Gunn after he was fired by Disney for a string of recently resurfaced offensive tweets.

Alan Horn, chairman of Walt Disney Studios, said in a statement on Friday that Gunn, 51, had been fired because the messages, written in 2008 and 2009, were deemed “indefensible”.

“The offensive attitudes and statements discovered on James’s Twitter feed are indefensible and inconsistent with our studio’s values, and we have severed our business relationship with him,” Horn said in a statement.

Gunn was behind the first two Guardians of the Galaxy Marvel movie hits and had been working on the script for the third. The old tweets that made light of rape, paedophilia, 9/11 and the Holocaust were discovered by the conservative website the Daily Caller. Gunn has been vocal in his criticism of Donald Trump, tweeting last year that the US is in “a national crisis with an incompetent president”.