Los Angeles: Striking screen actors will begin picketing alongside writers in New York and Los Angeles on Friday in what has become the biggest Hollywood labor fight in decades. The double-barreled strike will shut down the small number of productions that continued shooting in the two months since screenwriters stopped working. Many actors made a show of solidarity on the writers' picket lines, including Fran Drescher, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists president and former star of The Nanny.
The union's 65,000-member actors' branch will now formally join them as fellow strikers. The two guilds have similar issues with studios and streaming services. They are concerned about contracts keeping up with inflation, residual payments in the streaming era and putting up guardrails against the use of artificial intelligence mimicking their work on film and television shows. The famous faces of Oscar and Emmy winners will likely be seen with some regularity on picket lines, adding star power to the writers' demonstrations outside studios and corporate offices.
Meanwhile, the A-list cast of filmmaker Christopher Nolan's new movie Oppenheimer left the film's London screening midway in solidarity with the strike called by a Hollywood's actors union. On Thursday, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Radio and Television Artists (SAG-AFTRA) voted to join screenwriters in the first joint strike after failing to reach a consensus for a new contract with the studios and streaming services, represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP).
