‘We will not back down’: Hollywood stars on the actors’ strike
In the first week of the Screen Actors Guild strike that’s disrupting the film and television industries, Hollywood actors have been speaking on and off the picket line about their thoughts. The strike has been described by the actor and Sag-Aftra president, Fran Drescher, as a response to an unfair system that’s diminishing and demeaning to performers. “We are the victims here,” she said. “We are being victimised by a very greedy entity. I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us.”
The main focus is on base pay for residuals and the use of artificial intelligence within film and television, similar bones of contention for screenwriters who are also on strike concurrently.
Here are the major names who have added their thoughts to date:
“This is an inflection point in our industry. Actors and writers in large numbers have lost their ability to make a living. For our industry to survive that has to change. For actors that journey starts now,” – George Clooney
“If our residuals go down it means our health insurance isn’t going to be met. In a way, the streaming services have shot themselves in the foot because they’ve said, ‘oh, we’re going very well on this front’. And when we called them to task and said ‘what about our residuals, what about our money?’, everything kind of closes down and ... you know, it’s not going to happen,” – Brian Cox
“Sending love to all my fellow actors and writers. Praying that this is resolved swiftly and we all come out feeling empowered! Families have to be fed, but people have to and deserve to be respected for their work as well,” – Keke Palmer
“It’s gonna be tough for the actors, for 160,000 actors. Nobody wants a work stoppage but if our leadership is saying that the deal isn’t fair then we gotta hold strong. It’s the difference between having healthcare and not for a lot of actors, and we gotta do what’s right by them,” – Matt Damon
“AI will affect everybody. There’s definitely always been the feeling that if it isn’t solved now, how do we ever solve it in the future? If you don’t have the foresight to put something in place for the future, then you’re screwed. It’s clear that nothing is going to change from the top down, it’s going to be up to us at the bottom,” – Susan Sarandon
“We always worked in a business that rewarded success and didn’t want failure. Now, we have these opaque streamers who kind of tell us what’s a success and what’s a failure and I wouldn’t trust an employer to tell me how well I’m doing,” – David Duchovny
“The AMPTP refused to make a fair deal on television, theatrical and streaming work. We are not afraid of a fight and we will not back down. My union, SAG/AFTRA is now on strike,” – Jessica Chastain
“They’ve created an empire of billionaires & believe that we are no longer of value. While they hang out in the billionaire boy summer camps laughing like fat cats, we organize a new world for workers,” – Mark Ruffalo
“I’m striking because if it wasn’t for the folks who fought for me to have residuals, I would’ve been living on ramen for the rest of my life. I mean, I really am grateful for what we have but the industry has changed and those contracts need to be updated as well,” – Rosario Dawson
“I’ve been a proud SAG member since 1995. I love my job. Hoping for a FAIR meeting of the minds” – Niecy Nash
“Make no mistake: This strike SUCKS for us. On the heels of a shutdown, with both SAG/AFTRA and the WGA striking at once?? The last time this happened, the SAG president was an actor named Ronald Reagan. But do you know how many of us voted to authorize it? 98%. Because we know the stakes,” – James Van Der Beek
“I think AI is a huge issue. I think that transparency, I think that the basic wage. But you know, all of these things are things that I personally can negotiate for but I’m here for the working class, middle class part of our union. You know, who need these basic provisions in their basic contract” – Kevin Bacon
“I hope our wonderful indispensable fans understand we are striking not just for ourselves but for the future and the literal survival of the entertainment industry,” – Jean Smart
“I am proud to be standing tall with the WGAWest and WGAEast as actors and writers together demand a fair share of the record-breaking profits the studios have been reaping from our labor for far too long. We will win this!” – Cynthia Nixon
about how intersectionality is important to the question of women’s work. A pin-back button for the little-known National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), a women’s rights group, draws attention to the efforts by women of color to get their childcare labor recognized as real work. As Gutierrez recounted, women – particularly women of color – would often be put into a bind in which they were forced to find others to care for their children so that they could perform other forms of labor, yet that labor wouldn’t afford them the means to pay for childcare. “The women at NWRO made the point that what they were doing was in fact work,” said Gutierrez.
Even as they sought to make Women’s Work as thorough and representational as they could, Gutierrez and her colleagues found that they were challenged by how structural forms of oppression had limited the holdings of the New-York Historical Society (NYHS). “We made a really concerted effort to include women from as many backgrounds as we could, but that was in some ways a bit of a challenge. The NYHS has centuries of collecting practices that privileged elite white families. So to find voices like
Indigenous women’s, or Asian American women, or enslaved women – to find those voices can sometimes be a real dig.”
They were, however, able to find at least one piece by an Indigenous woman, a beaded pincushion made by Haudenosaunee women; these handicrafts were in fact ways by which Indigenous women pursued their own liberation in the face of forces that were taking away their traditional way of life. “These beaded pincushions were made by Haudenosaunee workers, and sold around tourist spots in Niagara Falls,” said Gutierrez. “This was happening at a time when their lands where being appropriated, and they needed a new revenue stream. So these bead-makers effectively created a new market, and a new revenue stream. As this demonstrates, in the show we also want to show women’s agency, even for people who were disenfranchised.”
Those disenfranchised groups also include LGBTQ+ women. Gutierrez shared that this was a particularly hard group to document and include in the show, as it can be tricky to talk about women who may not have identified as LGBTQ+, simply because those were not broadly accepted categories in their lifetimes. In addition, Gutierrez brought up the matter of how these women are generally seen by society at large, bemoaning the fact that “the only photos we have in our collection that identify trans women are photos of sex workers”.
She went on to add: “We wanted to make sure we included the perspective of trans women, and sex work was one of the only kinds of work that trans women of color could do in the 1980s. That was a time when New Yorkers were not protected against discrimination in housing and employment. We wanted to really bring that forward and show the limitations that can be placed on certain kinds of women when they’re trying to navigate the workforce.”
In the end, Women’s Work is a gigantic undertaking that successfully captures the immense scale and the intricate complexity of the subject it attempts to examine. Poring over more than 200 years of history, Women’s
Work also reminds us that the questions it considers are very much active and alive in our own times. “The legacy of gendered work is so very much still with us,” said Gutierrez. “For instance, the gender wage gap is still a thing, and it’s incredibly stubborn. There are a lot of places in the exhibition where we have history quotes about how great it is that you can pay women less for the same work, and that still happens today. It’s not just history – it’s bleeding into current events.”
Women’s Work is on view at the New-York Historical Society from 21 July to 18 August 2024
ible” – contained on a thumb drive.
The film was aided, McGann said, by Keenan’s father, Peter, and the freediving community, which “really held my hand and walked me through the whole story”. Such openness stemmed from Keenan’s reputation as a beloved safety diver. “It’s the ultimate trust exercise, as the diver,” said McGann of Keenan’s role. “You’re putting your life in your safety diver’s hands as you go down. And you trust that if anything goes wrong, this person’s going to bring you back up to air. And he did that for so many people.”
The Deepest Breath is now out in cinemas and will be available on Netflix on 19 July