Billy Porter is feeling the pinch due to the SAG-AFTRA strike. The Pose actor has now revealed that he has been forced to sell his house due to the resulting financial hardship of the strike. “I have to sell my house,” he told the Evening Standard, “because we’re on strike.” Porter noted that as an artist, “until you make f–k-you money — which I haven’t made yet,” life is still paycheck-to-paycheck, he says. “I was supposed to be in a new movie and on a new television show starting in September. None of that is happening.” Porter also took a shot at the anonymous Hollywood executive who told Deadline that the goal was to drag out the strike until writers and actors were forced to sell their homes: “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.”
He reserved, however, the greatest scorn for Disney’s CEO Bob Iger, who, in his recent comments, claimed that the demands for a living wage made by striking writers and actors were “unrealistic.” “To hear Bob Iger say that our demands for a living wage are unrealistic? While he makes $78,000 a day?” Porter said. “I don’t have any words for it, but: F— you. That’s not useful, so I’ve kept my mouth shut. I haven’t engaged because I’m so enraged.” In addition, he plans to “join the picket lines” when he returns home from London, where he is currently co-producing a musical.
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Hollywood’s current strikes began on May 2 with the Writers Guild of America strike. There are more than 11,000 Hollywood writers who the WGA represents. The recent strike results from the WGA having been unable to reach an acceptable wage agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers after six weeks of wage negotiations. SAG-AFTRA, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists began a strike on July 4. SAG-AFTRA’s demands include “minimum earnings to simply keep up with inflation,” protection of performers’ “images and performances to prevent replacement of human performances by artificial intelligence technology,” “compensation to reflect the value we bring to the streamers who profit from our labor,” and “support from our employers to keep our health and retirement funds sustainable.” There is no date set for the end of the strike at this time.
