When striking actors aren't on the picket lines, many of them are using social media to underscore how making it in Hollywood doesn’t necessarily result in big payouts.
Across TikTok and X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, a handful of actors with big followings are going viral for showing off some of their residual checks, which are paid out quarterly throughout the year for reruns or streams of movies or TV series.
SAG-AFTRA, the actors union, has argued that performers have been undermined by the new economics of streaming entertainment and threatened by emerging technologies.
SAG-AFTRA members this month joined Writers Guild of America members, who began striking in May. Both guilds are demanding that the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, or AMPTP, a trade association that bargains on behalf of studios, television networks and streaming platforms, provide more equitable pay, with a focus on enhancing residuals. (The AMPTP represents NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News.)
"Abbott Elementary" actor William Stanford Davis said his wages hadn’t increased “at all” throughout his more than three decades as a SAG member. In a TikTok video posted last week, he held up a residual check he received in May. It paid him 3 cents.
“I showed this to my brother, and he fell on the floor laughing,” he said in the video. “It ain’t f---ing funny.”
Kimiko Glenn, who appeared in more than 40 episodes of Netflix’s hit series “Orange Is the New Black,” posted a viral TikTok video joking about her shock at learning she had made only $27.30 in residuals after she panned down a foreign royalty statement that listed dozens of episodes that contributed to her pay.
In a follow-up video, Glenn said that although the actors are paid for their work up front, they deserve to earn revenue for every stream, because their image will live on in perpetuity. But for her and her "Orange Is the New Black" colleagues, she said, even the initial pay was poor.
“People were bartenders still. People had their second jobs still,” Glenn said. “They were f---ing famous as s---, like internationally famous, couldn’t go outside, but had to keep their second jobs because they couldn’t afford to not. We couldn’t afford cabs to set, you guys.”
Heather Matarazzo, known for her roles in “The Princess Diaries” and “Scream” series, responded to a TikTok comment — which claimed actors like her were part of the country’s “elites” — by showing a screenshot of several residual checks that paid out less than 10 cents apiece.
“Do those look like elite numbers?” Matarazzo asked in the video.
Mara Wilson, who starred in the hit 1996 comedy “Matilda,” tweeted that even though she appeared in well-known projects throughout her career as a child actor, she was among that majority.
“I haven’t acted much as an adult, but I WAS on a recurring character on one of the most critically acclaimed animated shows of all time, as well playing an actual Disney villain,” Wilson tweeted. “But thanks to streaming, I have never once made enough to qualify for SAG-AFTRA healthcare.”
Actor and writer Jana Schmieding also took to X this month to post a screenshot of her gross residual pay of 3 cents this quarter for her role on FX Productions’ “Reservation Dogs.”
On Instagram, actor Kendrick Sampson wrote in a post supporting the WGA strikers that when he added up 50 of his residual checks, he calculated a grand total of $86.
“This is why we strike,” he wrote. “The clock is ticking.”
A spokesperson for the AMPTP didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Last week, the AMPTP said in a document titled “What SAG-AFTRA Failed to Mention” that on July 12, SAG-AFTRA "walked away" from an offer that "is worth more than $1 billion in wage increases, pension & health contributions and residual increases and includes first-of-their-kind protections over its three-year term, including expressly with respect to AI," or artificial intelligence.
The group said it "has been clear from the outset that its goal is to arrive at a contract that is fair and equitable for SAG-AFTRA members."