Dispatches From The Picket Lines: Timothy Olyphant, Sean Astin, Allison Janney, Ben Schwartz & Michelle Hurd Join Thousands Of Actors On First Day Of SAG-AFTRA Strike

It’s Day 1 of the SAG-AFTRA strike and Day 74 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”.

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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, Ben Schwartz, 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 Deadline 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 Deadline, “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 Deadline.

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 the table wouldn’t engage and talk about what’s at stake. At a certain point, you have to say ‘Who can determine what our value is?’ Look at these thousands of people, we’re determining what our value and you know who else determines what our value is? The audience. They want to engage with our characters. If you were to ask them how they’d like to divvy up the pie, they’d say at least a little 2% to go to all the performers,” he said.

Michelle Hurd, the Star Trek: Picard actor who is also on the SAG-AFTRA negotiating committee, added healthcare was a major topic. “The majority of the time, actors are unemployed. We have lived for decades, sustaining ourselves on those little residual checks that come in every month so we can cobble things together,” she added.

Fran Drescher has been touring picket locations, including at Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery. Outside Netflix, she said that the studios were “doing bad things to good people”.

At Warner Bros. Discovery, whose boss David Zaslav is currently at Sun Valley, said actors are no longer “serfs and peasants”. “There was a revolution, we’re all free now,” she said, continuing her theme of breaking down the gates of Versailles.

After saying “The jig is up” at yesterday’s SAG-AFTRA press conference, the phrase has become something of a chant on the picket lines.

Aisha Tyler, who has starred in Criminal Minds, Friends and The Last Thing He Told Me and also a member of the DGA, said that she had hoped the directors would have joined the picket lines as well. “A triple strike would have really shifted ground here. But I do think a double strike was what we needed to bring the business to a halt so that people could really focus on the issues at hand,” she said. “We are still in the era of peak television and peak streaming, and there’s a lot of money to be made, and there’s a lot of great television and film to be to be generated. Now is the time to put the structures in place that make sure that we have a robust future for everyone in this business.

John Carroll Lynch, who played Norm Gunderson in Fargo and has starred in The Drew Carey Show and American Horror Story, said most of his actor friends can’t make a living. “They can’t make health insurance. They’re living off their savings. They can have an IMDB page that has 50 credits and they continue to get offered work [but] they can’t make a living,” he said. “It’s about safeguarding the dream of being a creative person who can make a living at the art they love.

There were plenty of younger actors and those starting out in their careers. Kate Comer, who has featured in The Dropout and Reboot, and Stevie Nelson, who has appeared in White House Plumbers are new SAG-AFTRA strike captains Comer told Deadline, “We want a fair contract, we want to make a living wage, we don’t want our images used in perpetuity without being paid, we’re ready.”

Nelson added, “Actors have been taken advantage of for decades now and we want to make a living like everyone else.”

The cast of Amazon’s Freevee series Jury Duty were also out together after scoring a top Emmy nomination for the gonzo comedy. Ron Song said he doesn’t want “labor to be diminished any further”, while Ben Seaward said “Pay needs to reflect the reality of profit”. Alan Barinholtz, father of Ike Barinholtz is a new SAG member after his unlikely turn as the judge, added, “This is absolutely necessary so everyone gets fair treatment”.

In front of Disney’s Burbank lot, Parks and Rec alum and The Afterparty star Ben Schwartz told Deadline about the combined SAG-AFTRA and WGA strike, which marched around the entire Disney studio: “It’s all so new, and the structure of the streaming stuff is so new, we’re figuring it out on the fly. I think this is one of the reasons why this is so big.”

Important to many rank-and-file actors, yet not a deal point that the SAG-AFTRA negotiating committee is taking up, is streamers’ massive cutting of movies and series from their OTT services, a means by which residuals aren’t cut off to scribes and actors. Schwartz shared he had a movie that was cut recently from Disney+, Flora & Ulysses.

Schwartz was out at the pickets with friend scribe/actor, Gil Ozeri (History of the World: Part II). Both are members of WGA and SAG-AFTRA.

Said Ozeri about the latest wave of series and movie cuts on streaming portals, “It’s just another reflection of how creators aren’t as valued as much, by taking their stuff off the air and not putting it on after they make it.”

“It’s a perfect example of something we have to figure out and now is the time to do it and now we have the power of two unions together to try and get it done, which is pretty exciting,” added Schwartz.

The actors joining the strike has also evidently had an impact on the writers, who are still out in force. One WGA lot coordinator told Deadline that it was like it’s day one all over again for them. “At this point we’re ready to be on strike for 300 days if we have to.”

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