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”.

Dave Bautista (@DaveBautista) I will have more to say but for right now all I will say is this..@JamesGunn is one of the most loving,caring,good natured people I have ever met. He’s gentle and kind and cares deeply for people and animals. He’s made mistakes. We all have. Im NOT ok with what’s happening to him

On Saturday Bautista leapt to Gunn’s defence, saying that while the director had “made mistakes” he did not deserve to be sacked. “I will have more to say but for right now all I will say is this: @JamesGunn is one of the most loving, caring, good natured people I have ever met. He’s gentle and kind and cares deeply for people and animals. He’s made mistakes. We all have. Im NOT ok with what’s happening to him,” Bautista wrote on Twitter.

In one of the old tweets, Gunn wrote: “The best thing about being raped is when you’re done being raped and it’s like ‘whew this feels great, not being raped!’”

He initially tweeted an apology for “outrageous and taboo” jokes, later releasing a longer statement, taking “full responsibility” for his actions.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In 2011, James Gunn had apologised in a statement to the LGBT organisation Glaad for comments he made about gay comic-book characters. Photograph: Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty

“My words of nearly a decade ago were, at the time, totally failed and unfortunate efforts to be provocative,” his statement read. “I have regretted them for many years since – not just because they were stupid, not at all funny, wildly insensitive, and certainly not provocative like I had hoped, but also because they don’t reflect the person I am today or have been for some time.”

In 2011, Gunn had apologised in a statement to the organisation Glaad (formerly the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) for a number of blogposts that contained crude jokes about gay comic-book characters.

Gunn’s credits also include the 2006 horror Slither and he was set to reboot Starsky & Hutch TV series. The Guardians franchise has made more than $1.6bn (£1.2bn) worldwide to date and the third was expected to be released in 2020.