Hollywood Actors Strike TV and Movie Actors Vote for Biggest Walkout in Four Decades

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Pinned About 160,000 television and movie actors are going on strike at midnight, joining screenwriters who walked off the job in May and setting off Hollywood’s first industrywide shutdown in 63 years. The leaders of the union, SAG-AFTRA, approved a strike on Thursday, hours after contract talks with a group of studios broke down. Actors will be on the picket line starting on Friday. “What’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor,” said Fran Drescher, SAG-AFTRA’s president. “When employers make Wall Street and greed their priority and they forget about the essential contributors who make the machine run, we have a problem.” Ms. Drescher said the union was still willing to negotiate — even later today — but only if the studios are “willing to talk in a normal way that honors what we do.” The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of Hollywood companies, released a statement at the start of the news conference saying that the union has “regrettably chosen a path that will lead to financial hardship for countless thousands of people who depend on the industry.” The previous three-year contract expired at 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday, after an extension from June 30 to allow for continued talks. But the two sides are divided on a range of issues, including pay and the use of artificial intelligence. The union says it is trying to ensure living wages for workaday actors and to protect its members from having their likenesses used in productions they took no part in. The studios, which released a list of 14 proposals they offered the actors, maintain that they have worked to reach a reasonable deal at a time when the industry has been upended by the growth of streaming services and faced shrinking viewership and lower box office returns. Many of the actors’ demands mirror those of the striking writers, whose own work stoppage had already brought many productions to a halt even before the actors voted for their first major walkout in more than 40 years. It’s been even longer — since 1960, when Marilyn Monroe was still starring in films — since actors and screenwriters were on strike at the same time. The dual strikes pit more than 170,000 workers against old-line studios like Disney, Universal, Sony and Paramount, as well newer juggernauts like Netflix, Amazon and Apple. Here’s what to know: