Most actors are broke – this strike should kill the ‘champagne socialist’ myth dead

This week saw the London premiere for Christopher Nolan’s long-awaited, star-studded new film Oppenheimer. The event had all the usual trappings of a big budget Hollywood opening, except one thing: the cast. After posing for photographers outside Leicester Square Odeon flaunting a sartorial fabulousness worthy of the Oscars, Cillian Murphy (who plays the eponymous American developer of the atom bomb) and his co-stars Florence Pugh, Emily Blunt and Matt Damon left before the screening. The reason? America’s actors’ union SAG-AFTRA was about to call its first strike by members in 40 years.

Given the number of public sector strikes crippling parts of the UK this year, from doctors to teachers to train drivers, you’d be forgiven for not having noticed that America is in the middle of its own wave of industrial action. More specifically Hollywood, which has been partially shuttered since May following strike action by the writers’ union WGA over fair pay and conditions. The move is significant: the last time actors and writers went on strike at the same time was 60 years ago. That both have joined forces once again will have an impact that will be felt in nearly every living room on both sides of the pond. Not only have Hollywood studios had to stop production of major films, so have streaming giants such as Amazon, Disney and Netflix. Major casualties include Deadpool 3 and the new film version of musical Wicked starring Ariana Grande.

There’s an old joke in Hollywood in which one LA producer says to another: “Unfortunately the writer died. But we are still looking for ways to screw him.” Writers traditionally have always been at the bottom of the food chain in the movie-making ecology, an absurdity baked into the studio system since its inception. But actors? They are the stars, the human face of the Hollywood fantasy. Thanks to both the magical make-believe of TV and film and the impossible glamour of premieres and awards season, they embody the essential myth of Hollywood as a separate untouchable universe, a La La Land full of special, beautiful people who don’t live like you and me. So much so that I imagine sympathy for their cause will be in short supply. When off the screen, we tend not to take actors entirely seriously. We regard them as luvvies, champagne socialists living inside gated mansions who like to pontificate on social issues they can’t possibly know anything about.

Yet streaming services are threatening both the myth and the economics of tinsel town. Alongside pressing for better regulated use of AI by studios and streamers, a major gripe of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA centres on “residuals”. This is a catch-all American term for royalties and foreign levies typically earned by actors, particularly in hit TV shows, from repeats and foreign licensing, all of which make up a sizeable part of their income. The eye-watering amounts the star cast of Friends continue to get for repeats ($20million a year each in 2015 alone) has distorted our perception of how lucrative this can be: most actors don’t get anywhere near as much. Even so, the contractual arrangements offered by new media platforms, which in simple terms don’t include residuals in the same way, have radically altered this economy. The New Yorker recently reported on the cast of one of Netflix’s first hits Orange Is the New Black (2013-2019), which along with House of Cards, simultaneously launched the service and cemented its game-changing power. The show made major stars of many of its supporting cast (and an awful lot of money for Netflix) but instant recognition factor on the street didn’t translate into pay cheques for most of the actors, who needed to maintain second jobs in order to pay the rent during shooting. Four years on, they get barely anything at all from repeated streaming.

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The SAG-AFTRA dispute doesn’t affect UK actors, yet the West End has been experiencing its own unrest over actors’ pay. Earlier this year West End actors threatened to strike after demanding a 17 per cent pay increase with theatre bosses; actors’ union Equity revealed that 45 per cent of its members had a second job, and 60 per cent were considering quitting the industry altogether. Equity managed to negotiate a pay increase of 16 per cent across the next three years. Even so, the new basic rate for eight shows a week in a 1,100-seat theatre is £712 a week, which works out at £89 per show in the commercial sector where, let’s not forget, the average top ticket price is around £140. Meanwhile, at the subsidised Royal Court’s recent production Sound of the Underground, a cast of drag queens handed out buckets during the show in protest at their £600-a-week wage. Worse, current pay levels across the theatre profession remain riven with gender disparities. The recent Big Freelancer Survey revealed that the average annual pay for male freelancers was £32,600 but only £20,400 for women, which is less than the London Living Wage.

Creative economies are complex beasts, particularly in the live entertainment sector. Even so, it’s increasingly the case that the stars of the show are rarely the ones reaping the rewards, while the foot soldiers are barely managing to survive. A resolution is not looking good for the WGA according to one anonymous studio exec, who recently told the Hollywood publication Deadline that “the endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses”. If this is how those at the top truly view the creatives that make a show into a hit, there soon might not be an entertainment industry to speak of at all.