Irish actors take to picket line in Hollywood

Irish actors took to the picket line in Hollywood on Thursday to show solidarity with those striking over pay, AI technology and how to divide the profits of the new digital streaming era.

Irish members of the Screen Actors Guild joined demonstrations outside Paramount Studios at 9am local time (5pm Irish time).

Irish actor Jason O’Mara said the two main issues at stake were residuals, which are long-term payments to those who work on films and television shows, negotiated by unions, for reruns and other airings after the initial release, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

O’Mara has been living in Los Angeles for 20 years and has won a best supporting actor Ifta [Irish Film & Television Academy] award for his role in The Siege of Jadotville. He has also appeared in several US television shows.

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“Residuals are really important to the jobbing actor and even the more successful actors rely on residuals because with long periods of unemployment, they’re kind of like royalties or licence fees that as long as the project you’ve been part of has a life, you get paid and share in those profits over a long period of time,” he said.

“Sometimes the amounts are quite nominal, but they can add up and they really help to even out the highs and lows of an actor’s career. Since streaming came along we have had no contract that deals with residuals so we’ve been working on an old contract and the business model has changed so we’ve been sort of left in the dust of progression in one sense.”

O’Mara added that what was “worrying” in relation to AI was “we don’t quite fully understand it yet so we don’t quite know what’s going to happen there. It’s about tightening the regulations … to create a framework to protect actors from exploitation as we enter this kind of uncertain time.”

Striking simultaneously

The strike by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (Sag-Aftra) marks the first time in 63 years that Hollywood writers and actors are striking simultaneously.

The 11,500 members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike on May 2nd and were joined by some 160,000 members of Sag-Aftra last month.

Actors and writers have spoken of the shrinking compensation for their work as film and TV shows have increasingly moved to online streaming platforms and rising fears of how the industry might try to replace creative workers of all kinds with AI technologies.

The strike has yielded support from high-profile Irish stars such as screenwriter and actor Sharon Horgan, who used her Bafta acceptance speech to express solidarity with “our WGA brothers and sisters” and Oscar-nominated Colin Farrell, who gave an impassioned speech on a New York picket line in May saying there would be no cinema or television without writers.