AFTER the pandemic forced us to realise it’s the people who do the low-status jobs – the bin collectors and shelf-stackers – who are the most valuable and least valued by society, the Hollywood actors’ strike seems not just silly but surreal.
If the refuse collectors went on strike, we’d die of rat plague. If the shelf-stackers did, we’d starve.
It is hard to take the “actors’ strike” seriously without smirking, writes Julie Burchill
When actors go on strike, we watch films and TV from a golden age before wokeness made entertainment boring.
It’s been a while since a member of the acting profession was involved in anything so breathtakingly ridiculous.
But now, with the advent of the “actors’ strike” — it’s hard to even type those words without smirking — unintentional laughs aplenty can be had at the expense of those who choose to do a cushy job rather than a socially useful one, yet nonetheless think of themselves as being on a par with great activists of our time for enduring an extra-long stint in the make-up chair.
This week Matt Damon — net worth an estimated £130million — told Variety, as he posed on the red carpet at the premiere of Oppenheimer, that “this is real life-and-death stuff”.
The film began its London premiere an hour early to allow its cast to smile for the cameras before the strike came into effect.
Before the film was shown, director Christopher Nolan announced that its stars had left the building in solidarity with their fellow actors.
Can’t you just imagine the conversations in the luvvie loos at the after-party? “Did you see my solidarity-flounce?”
“Darling, it was divine — did you see my power-to-the-people pout?”
The night before, at the Barbie premiere in Leicester Square, Margot Robbie (who earned £9.5million for the role — but she’s still starting out, so don’t judge) said she would “absolutely” support the strike.
And George Clooney, net worth a reported £380million, opined that: “Actors and writers in large numbers have lost their ability to make a living.
“For our industry to survive, that has to change. For actors, that journey starts now.”
But these three are busy thesps at the peak of their endorsement potential — sorry, artistic growth. You can’t blame them for leaving the heavy lifting — those paper placards don’t carry themselves, you know — to those with a little more time on their hands.
Enter Susan Sarandon, worth an estimated £45million and Fran Drescher, worth a reported £19million.
Miss Drescher, late of TV sitcom The Nanny, is now making up for never having played Joan of Arc.
Yes, instead of getting burnt at the stake, she’s getting fawned over on female panel shows — but it’s all about being an Empowered Strong Woman, innit!
During one impassioned performance, Miss Drescher shook her fists and told the studios: “We demand respect! You cannot exist without us!”
She was discussing how the spectre of being replaced by AI avatars weighs heavy on the minds of actors.
Though seeing how many of them render themselves nearly unrecognisable by use of cosmetic attempts to stave off ageing, you couldn’t really blame the studios for getting ideas about the audience’s desire to see films populated by plastic-faced, semi-human freaks.
You’d think actors would love the chance to go and get socially useful jobs, rather than being paid to distract people from real life — to escape the thankless treadmill of dressing up in eye-wateringly expensive clothes and flying all over the world in carbon-emitting private jets to pose for photographs and talk about themselves.
Besides, it’s going to be decades before the drama queens could realistically get the heave-ho in favour of replicants.
They can’t even do the de-ageing thing properly yet — the latest Indiana Jones made an attempt.
It was state-of-the-art but even there you can tell something funny is going on — and that was with the full and willing participation of the actor concerned.
So I’m sure Hollywood bosses will eventually agree to the actors’ demands to respect their meat-puppetry, as it’s no big deal to agree not to do something you cannot do anyway.
But though they may win in the short-term, the acting profession’s collective reputation may well be besmirched by this action.
It’s telling that the actors are supporting the initial writers’ strike.
Without writers, these femme fatales and superheroes are exposed as rather dull, conformist fashion followers, supporting green and liberal policies from within their gated communities policed by private forces.
And don’t bring up Emma Thompson flying from Los Angeles to London just to join an Extinction Rebellion protest.
Hollywood’s striking stars should consider sharing their wealth around the industry
It’s a proven fact that if you’ve won an Oscar, your air miles don’t hurt the planet, but actually heal it, like Superman pushing the world backwards.
An actors’ strike would always have been the stuff of comedy. If a person pretending to be someone else stops pretending, does the audience then have to applaud them for not pretending? Or can we “civilians” (Liz Hurley’s word for non-actors) just amuse each other?
The actors vs studios bitch fight isn’t some David vs Goliath tale of little guys taking on evil giants.
It’s the story of two different types of arrogant fat-cats who have mistaken their lucrative games of Let’s Pretend for real life.
Although the tiny minority who make it become rich beyond reason, most scrape a living. The Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists points out that only 15 per cent of the union’s 160,000 members make the required $26,000 (£19,860) a year to qualify for US healthcare coverage.
It’s a horrible situation and you can understand why these struggling actors would want to join the picket lines.
But seeing as how their altruism keeps them awake at nights, why don’t the A-list luvvies just take a pay cut to achieve more equitable earnings for the poorly paid supporting actors on their latest blockbuster?
