Hollywood actors announce strike after contract negotiations fail

The national board for the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA, announced the call to strike at an afternoon news conference on Thursday, a day after negotiations broke down.

The union’s 160,000 members—be they background actors or A-listers—are forbidden from doing work or promotion for major studios and streamers. In effect, nearly every TV or film actor in the country will join 11,000 members of the Writers Guild of America who walked off set in early May, marking the first time Hollywood’s writers and actors have simultaneously withheld their work in 63 years. A SAG-AFTRA strike means more than actors walking off the set of their films or TV shows. They are also prohibited from promoting their work, which could have a major impact on film festivals, upcoming releases and award show campaigns.

“The eyes of the world, and particularly the eyes of labor, are upon us,” SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher said in a fiery speech that lambasted the studios. “Our heart bleeds that we had to make this decision, but we can’t not get what these members deserve because it’s only going to get worse.”

The tense Hollywood standoff comes as studios and the guilds grapple with the digital age. The avalanche of shows and movies studios have pumped out to keep up with the demands of streaming might slow to a trickle. A joint walkout by actors will probably shut down nearly all remaining filming—leaving an industry at an inflection point that could define it for decades to come.

Much of both unions’ demands revolve around technological advancements that ushered in a tremendous sea change for the industry, namely the rise of the streaming era and the burgeoning of artificial intelligence. Both guilds demand higher pay, arguing that it has become increasingly difficult to make a living in the streaming era for a variety of reasons.

Streaming shows have come with structural changes, including shorter seasons, that leave both writers and actors with less pay. Meanwhile, they usually come with meager or nonexistent residuals, the financial compensation paid to entertainers based on how much their work is viewed (think: syndication, reruns, DVD sales), while “the studios are posting immense profits with a bullish outlook as demonstrated by lavish corporate executive compensation,” according to SAG-AFTRA’s website.

Furthermore, they argue, there’s a lack of regulations or protections against artificial-intelligence technology being used to appropriate actors’ likenesses and aid with scriptwriting, which writers see as an attempt to cut costs.

“The studios and streamers have implemented massive unilateral changes in our industry’s business model, while at the same time insisting on keeping our contracts frozen in amber,” SAG-AFTRA’s national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said in a statement.

The studios argue the guilds are overreaching, particularly in an industry still suffering the blows of the pandemic. Disney chief executive Bob Iger slammed SAG-AFTRA’s requests as “not realistic” in a CNBC interview Thursday morning. “It’s very disturbing to me,” he said. “We’ve talked about disruptive forces on this business and all the challenges that we’re facing and the recovery from covid, which is ongoing; it’s not completely back.”

“I respect their right and their desire to get as much as they possibly can in compensation for their people,” he continued. “But you also have to be realistic about the business environment and what this business can deliver.”

While actors and writers have both walked off set several times—including the 2007 writers strike and a roughly three-month actors strike in 1980—they have picketed simultaneously only once: in 1960, when the Screen Actors Guild was led by Ronald Reagan. That double walkout ended when studios agreed—among other transformative conditions—to pay actors a percentage of money earned when movies were licensed for TV.

SAG-AFTRA and the studios tried for weeks to avoid a second strike, extending an original deadline of June 30 into this month and making a last-minute request for help from the U.S. government’s Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which dispatched a senior mediator to participate in the final round of talks on Wednesday.

Still, both sides of the negotiating table were unable to settle on terms and have blamed the other for the upset.

Drescher blasted the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, or AMPTP—the bargaining group representing major studios that she had publicly hoped to reach a deal with a few weeks earlier.

“AMPTP’s responses to the union’s most important proposals have been insulting and disrespectful of our massive contributions to this industry,” Drescher said in a statement Thursday morning. “The companies have refused to meaningfully engage on some topics and on others completely stonewalled us. Until they do negotiate in good faith, we cannot begin to reach a deal.”

The AMPTP, meanwhile, placed the blame on the actors union for not reaching a deal. AMPTP spokesman Scott Rowe said the actors’ union “dismissed our offer of historic pay and residual increases, substantially higher caps on pension and health contributions, audition protections, shortened series option periods, a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors’ digital likenesses and more.”

The announcement of the strike comes before next Friday’s dual release of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” widely anticipated to be the biggest movie weekend of the year. But the London premieres of both films found stars discussing the dispute. Margot Robbie, star and producer of “Barbie,” told Sky News she was “very much in support of all the unions.”

The London premiere of “Oppenheimer” had been moved up in anticipation of Thursday’s announcement. “If our leadership is saying that the deal isn’t fair, then we gotta hold strong until we get a deal that’s fair for working actors,” said Matt Damon, who, along with the rest of the cast, walked out of the event after the strike was called.

A-list actors such as Meryl Streep, Jamie Lee Curtis, Quinta Brunson and Pedro Pascal had previously declared their willingness to strike in an open letter to SAG-AFTRA’s leaders, many saying they’re striking for their less famous peers.

“I just want everybody to understand that this isn’t about making more millions of dollars, because quiet as it’s kept, at least 80% of our union are plain old, ordinary, hard-working people who haven’t gotten a cost of living raise in 40 years,” singer and actress Sheryl Lee Ralph told Vanity Fair.

New York-based actor Adria Crum said that while the work is rewarding, even as a lesser-known artist, the pay needs to match the “millions upon millions upon millions” the entertainment industry is making.

“It’s going to be a little difficult to, you know, pay all the bills,” she said. “But I’m going to just have to manage because this is that important right now. It’s really that important that this gets settled because, otherwise, we’re going to still have issues paying the bills anyway.”

Comedian Jenny Yang was already touring this summer to make ends meet, since she can’t pick up TV jobs as a member of both SAG-AFTRA and the WGA. She said she’s felt “downward pressure” and “profit extraction” studios have applied to both actors and writers, such as downgrading actors’ titles from one season to the next, chipping away at their pay.

She believes the writers strike, which has crawled into its third month, may have “emboldened” SAG-AFTRA membership to join them on the picket line and added that actors and writers were riled up because of recent comments from studio execs, particularly one widely circulated quote an unnamed executive gave to Deadline: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”

“What a trash heap of nonsense,” Yang said. “The joke amongst actors and writers is, yeah, with the way you’ve been running the business, we’ve been used to being unemployed for long stretches of time.”

“Try us.”