Hollywood actors marked 100 days on strike last weekend, and while they are feeling the financial strain of months without work, they have found renewed resolution in their fight against the studios.
Raquel Bell joined her colleagues on the picket line at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles on Friday for the first time since the beginning of the strike in July. It was the first day she had been able to make it away from her second job as a caregiver in a nursing home, and come kid-free.
“I’m just trying to get anything I can in order to be able to pay bills,” Bell said. “And not just that, I’m concerned about my medical insurance because I have two children.”
Bell is a working actor with 15 years’ experience in TV and commercials. She said she just had to cancel internet service at her home to make ends meet this month. “It’s really troublesome because my children need the internet to do school at home,” she said. “So we have to just do without it.”
Working actors like Bell are weathering the strike by picking up other jobs. Brendan Bradley, a 17-year member of Sag-Aftra, the actors’ union on strike, said he’s worked side jobs from carpentry to catering throughout his career. To make ends meet during the strike, he’s performing in virtual reality theater. Kate Comer, an actor for nearly 15 years, said emergency financial assistance grants from the Entertainment Community Fund and Sag-Aftra Foundation helped her catch up on some bills. “It helped me to take my car in to get checked. It helped me to pay rent for at least like a month.” Jessie Brown, a background actor for several years, also said she relies on grants, donations of food and water on the picket line, and her own father. “And I hate to do that because he’s … on a fixed income. It’s just a very stuck situation.”
Negotiations between the actors’ union and studio executives resumed on Tuesday after breaking down again earlier this month over disagreement between actors and the studios on the use of AI and residuals from streaming services.
Actors on the picket lines outside the gates of Paramount and Netflix studios expressed anxiety about not reaching an agreement before the holidays, but also fresh energy and commitment to their cause.
Bradley is a strike captain. He’s been outside every morning since the start of the strike in July, wearing an orange vest and a large hat covered in buttons, and directing pedestrian traffic as the sun beams down on about 30 sweaty actors marching in circles outside a Paramount studio gate. He said he learned how to be a strike captain – a volunteer position – from captains in the WGA strike.
He said people were feeling positive during the latest round of negotiations. “Everyone was kind of celebrating, saying their goodbyes and then they [the studios] walked away from the table.” Actors felt disrespected, he said, “It elevated and reactivated everybody to just say, ‘Oh no, then we’re gonna be out here for as long as it takes,’” he added.
Residual payments from streaming services are front of mind for many on the picket lines. Bradley, who describes his career as “that journeyman actor career that isn’t a celebrity, isn’t a millionaire”, said this was nonetheless once a sustainable livelihood. “And then as the advent of streaming came on board, we saw the dwindling of residual payments, which is basically our contingent compensation and really the second half of our compensation. And then we also saw the diminishment of upfront base salary and it not keeping pace with the cost of living.”
“I thought it was something wrong with me,” said Comer, who is a strike captain outside Netflix Studios on Sunset Boulevard. She described over a decade of working her way into more significant roles in productions with more acclaim, without seeing a commensurate increase in financial stability.
Comer said it was not easy to show up to the picket lines every morning. “I know sometimes it can look like we’re all dancing and singing and having fun out here, but nobody wants this. We want to be at work, we want to be earning money.” But, she said, they continue to make the best of it, referencing a report in July about the writers’ strike in which a studio executive said their tactic was to squeeze writers into a negotiation by letting them lose their housing. “There was like a leak that said that, you know, the CEOs wanted us to suffer and lose our houses and be miserable so that we finally take whatever deal. And so I’m not about to be out here giving them that satisfaction.”
