As the SAG-AFTRA actor’s strike continues on and the WGA writer’s strike hits 100 days on Wednesday, Grammy, Emmy, and Tony award-winning actor Billy Porter is sharing the harsh realities he’s facing as a result of the AMPTP’s refusal to give these workers a fair deal.
In a new interview with London’s Evening Standard, Porter revealed he’s had to get rid of his own home and that he’s “starved out since his upcoming projects have been put on halt.
“I have to sell my house,” Porter explained. “Yeah! Because we’re on strike. And I don’t know when we’re gonna go back. The life of an artist, until you make ‘fuck-you’ money— which I haven’t made yet—is still check-to-check. I was supposed to be in a new movie and on a new television show starting in September. None of that is happening. 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.” (For context, last month, an anonymous Hollywood exec told Deadline that the “endgame” for the WGA strikers was to “allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their house.”)
Later, when addressing the asinine and truly outrageous comments from Disney CEO Bob Iger, who described the strikes as “disturbing” and the expectations of strikers as “unrealistic,” Porter hit back:
“The business has evolved. So the contract has to evolve and change, period. To hear Bob Iger say that our demands for a living wage are unrealistic? While he makes $78,000 a day?
I don’t have any words for it, but: fuck you. That’s not useful, so I’ve kept my mouth shut. I haven’t engaged because I’m so enraged… When I go back I will join the picket lines.”