It’s Day 1 of the SAG-AFTRA strike and Day 75 of the WGA strike. The stars are out in force on the first day of the actors strike and, as Parks and Recreation co-creator Mike Schur said, “Now a thousand very attractive people have shown up and joined the lines, it’s an enormous amount of wind in our sails”. Schur, a member of the WGA negotiating committee who also starred as Mose Schrute on The Office, was joined by a slew of big-name actors including Allison Janney, Timothy Olyphant, Josh Gad, Sean Astin, Charlie Barnett, Joey King, Chloe Fineman, Susan Sarandon, Ginnifer Goodwin, Patton Oswalt, Marg Helgenberger, Jake McDorman, Constance Zimmer, Michelle Hurd and Jason Sudeikis across picket lines in LA and New York.
Skye P. Marshall, who is a lead on CBS’ upcoming reboot of Matlock alongside Kathy Bates, told FilmmakerFocus that the actors’ craft needs to be respected. “I was an extra for five and a half years so I know what it’s like to start at the bottom and grind and hustle,” she said. “We can’t be digitally duplicated, we have to be authenticated through our art and they need to respect that.”
Olyphant, whose Justified: City Primeval launches on FX next week, told FilmmakerFocus, “All I know is I’m sad I’m here but I’m happy I’m here, it’s the right thing to do and I hope we get everything we’re asking for like we should.”
Gad, who voices Olaf in Disney’s Frozen and starred in Beauty and The Beast, said he’d rather be writing and acting right now but said the strike was “absolutely essential” to get a fair deal. He said he thought Fran Drescher’s speech, where she called the studios greedy, was “remarkable” and helped many actors rally behind her. “We’re standing at a crossroads that is part of a seismic sea change that’s been happening for quite some time. Streaming has changed the game so much and our contracts have not caught up with that,” he told FilmmakerFocus.
Better Call Saul star Patrick Fabian agreed. “The business has changed since I’ve been in it and with that the compensation for actors needs to change as well and it just hasn’t. It’s been over a decade now of a business model that no longer services that actually makes the product,” he said.
AI and streaming residuals have emerged as the two biggest issues for actors walking the line for the first time in support of their union. Russian Doll star Charlie Barnett said that he felt empowered after hearing Drescher’s speech. “It’s a scary precipice.” He said that residual pay for streaming is one of the biggest issues for him. “These contracts that we built off of broadcast television have stood for so long and as much as there’s been small advancements, we have not seen any growth from the streaming platforms. It’s kind of like the wild west.”
“It’s absolutely imperative that we get as much language in there that protects us, our faces, our voices, so that they can’t just be fabricated at will by the studios,” said Gad.
Astin, who stars in Netflix’s biggest English-language drama series Stranger Things and who is a member of the SAG-AFTRA negotiating committee, said that the studios didn’t come close to meeting their demands on the nascent technology. “We have some extraordinarily committed volunteers and experts on AI, who spent months designing proposals that would be able to start to get our hands around what’s going on with this technology and the producers across
