Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranson recently went semi-full Walter White during a speech for the SAG-AFTRA strikers. In the process, he shouted, “[W]e will not be having our jobs taken away and given to robots!” For understandable reasons, emotions are running high, and that goes for the WGA strike as well, for which Ron Perlman admitted getting heated towards an anonymous studio executive who told Deadline that studios plan to hold out “until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” Another unnamed party called this “a cruel but necessary evil.”
Well, Emmy and Tony winner as well as FX’s Pose star Billy Porter is here to say that this is already happening. During an interview with the Evening Standard, Porter went off on the subject of nearly nonexistent streaming residuals. Porter hasn’t been on the picket lines yet, given that he’s been spending time in London, but he does plan upon picketing when he returns stateside. At the moment, Porter’s dealing with the fact that he has to sell his house due to the strikes. He confirmed that he’s certainly not joking, either:
“Yeah! Because we’re on strike. And I don’t know when we’re gonna go back [to work]. The life of an artist, until you make f***-you money — which I haven’t made yet — is still cheque-to-cheque. I was supposed to be in a new movie, and on a new television show starting in September. None of that is happening. So to the person who said ‘we’re going to starve them out until they have to sell their apartments … you’ve already starved me out.”
Additionally, Porter took issue with Disney CEO Big Iger recently expressing “that our demands for a living wage are unrealistic? While he makes $78,000 a day?” To that, Porter has “kept my mouth shut” for the most part, but he felt the need to address that unnamed exec mentioned above. And given that Porter is losing his house, one can see why he wishes to vent his frustration.
(Via Evening Standard)