Hollywood actors announce historic strike
Hollywood’s film and TV industry will effectively be shut down after actors announced they will join an ongoing strike by screenwriters in the industry’s biggest strike for more than 60 years.
The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) wants streaming giants to agree to a fairer split of profits and better working conditions.
Some 160,000 performers will stop work at midnight. The stoppage means the vast majority of US film and TV productions will grind to a halt.
Stars Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon and Emily Blunt left the premiere of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer in London on Thursday night as the strike was declared.
The SAG walkout starts at midnight Los Angeles time (08:00 BST). Picketing will begin on Friday morning outside the California headquarters of Netflix, before moving on to Paramount, Warner Bros and Disney.
Also Read: Hollywood Screenwriters Go On Strike Over Pay
The union – officially known as the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA – also wants a guarantee that artificial intelligence (AI) and computer-generated faces and voices will not be used to replace actors.
The group representing the studios, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, or AMPTP, slammed the decision.
It said “a strike is certainly not the outcome we hoped for as studios cannot operate without the performers that bring our TV shows and films to life”.
“The union has regrettably chosen a path that will lead to financial hardship for countless thousands of people who depend on the industry,” its statement added.
Ground-breaking proposal
To address concerns about the use of AI, the AMPTP said it had agreed to a “ground-breaking proposal” that would protect the digital likeness of actors, and require their consent when digital replicas are used in performances, or alterations are made.
But the SAG’s national executive director and chief negotiator, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, said the offer was unacceptable.
“They propose that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day’s pay, and their company should own that scan of their image, their likeness, and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity,” he said.
“If you think that’s a ground-breaking proposal, I suggest you think again.”
Another SAG demand of the streaming services is that actors receive greater base pay and residuals – meaning payments made to actors from repeats of films and programmes they’ve starred in.
The strike includes tens of thousands of actors who receive significantly less pay for bit parts than their A-list colleagues.
Fran Drescher, SAG’s president, said the strike comes at a “very seminal moment” for actors in the industry.
“What’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labour,” she said, “when employers make Wall Street and greed their priority, and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run.”
A separate strike by the 11,500 members of the Writers Guild of America demanding better pay and working conditions has been going since 2 May.
The “double strike” by both unions is the first since 1960, when the SAG was led by actor Ronald Reagan, long before he entered politics and became US president. The last strike by actors took place in 1980.
In the hours following the announcement, several SAG-affiliated actors took to Instagram to voice their support for the strike, including Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk, Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon and Hollywood veteran Jamie Lee Curtis.
