Hollywood A-listers donate millions to aid striking actors

A dozen of Hollywood’s highest-earning stars, from George Clooney to Meryl Streep, have every donated $1 million or extra to assist out-of-work actors as their strike enters its fourth week, their union’s charitable basis stated Wednesday.

The Display screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) walkout, and one other strike by movie and TV writers that started in Might over pay and the specter of synthetic intelligence, have introduced US movie and tv manufacturing to a halt. The Hollywood “double strike” of writers and actors — the primary since 1960 — has price the leisure business and the California economic system a number of million {dollars} per day, in addition to costing the putting unionists their pay checks.

However rich A-list celebrities, from Clooney and Streep to Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, in addition to Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey and others, have every contributed $1 million or extra to the SAG-AFTRA Basis’s actors’ assist fund. The nonprofit basis has raised greater than $15 million previously three weeks to help “1000’s of journeymen actors” going through financial hardship, it stated in a press release.

“The leisure business is in disaster and the SAG-AFTRA Basis is at the moment processing greater than 30 occasions our typical variety of functions for emergency support,” Courtney B Vance, the muse’s president, stated within the assertion. The group’s support programme is supposed to “be certain that performers in want do not lose their houses, have the power to pay for utilities, purchase meals for his or her households, buy life-saving prescriptions, cowl medical payments and extra,” Vance stated.

Whereas some actors are extremely paid, SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher stated this week that 86 p.c of the union’s 160,000 members earn lower than $26,500 a 12 months, The New York Occasions reported. The strikes have meant film productions are shut down, glitzy premieres are scrapped, and occasions such because the Emmys are delayed as stars are banned from selling TV reveals.

The unions’ calls for have targeted on larger pay within the streaming period and the risk posed to members’ careers and future livelihoods by synthetic intelligence, whereas studios say they need to reduce prices to deal with financial pressures. Whereas the writers’ union seems poised to return to talks on Friday, actors stay at an deadlock with main corporations akin to Netflix and Disney.