People recognize Jason Kravits, but aren’t sure how. “I’m that guy who looks like the guy you went to high school with,” says Kravits. “People think they just saw me somewhere.”
Actually, they have, on TV, usually as a lawyer or a doctor. “I’ve had enough roles to be in your living room on any given night,” says the veteran actor. “But most people don’t know my name.”
Kravits is one of those actors referred to as “day laborers” by union leaders, who tend to work for lower wages and spend at least as much time in line as they do working. They may have a great year, then a bad year, with no definite pattern. “We are always on the edge of a fight,” says Kravits.
And they, not the big Hollywood names seen at rallies, are at the heart of the actors’ strike.
Many say they fear that the general public will think that all actors are paid handsomely and that they pursue acting for the love of the art, almost as a hobby. However, in most cases it is their only job and they need to qualify for health insurance, pay rent or a mortgage, pay for school and college for their children.
“We’re not Tom Cruise,” says Amari Dejoie, 30, who is studying acting, doing extra work and modeling to stay afloat, and is considering working as a waitress during the strike. “We have rent and bills to pay, and they’re due on the first day. And your apartment doesn’t care that your check wasn’t as big as you expected.”
In an interview, actors at different stages of their careers discussed their lives and the reasons why they went on strike.
A CHECK FOR A CENT
Jennifer Van Dyck recently received a couple of royalty checks in the mail, one for 60 cents, another for 72 cents. But she has seen worse.
“The joke is when they mail you that one-cent check that costs 44 cents to send,” says the veteran New York actress, referring to payments for reruns and other broadcasts for a movie or TV show after its initial release.
Still, Van Dyck considers herself lucky. With many appearances on shows like “The Blacklist,” “Madam Secretary” and especially “Law & Order,” where he guest-starred 13 times, as well as voice-over work, he has been able to earn a living for over 30 years without having to look for a job outside of the industry.
“You keep moving forward,” she says. “When things dry up in one area, you move on to the next. It’s keeping all the balls in the air: theater, film, television, voiceover, audiobooks. Call us day laborers: half the job requirement is looking for a job.”
Van Dyck says the rise of streaming has cut actors’ incomes alarmingly, because streaming services give out little, if any, royalties. And when it comes to negotiating a fee to appear on a show, the studios don’t seem to care if you have 37 years of experience. “They say, ‘This is what we’re offering, take it or leave it.'”
He is still shocked by the misperception that actors are rich and famous. “Most of us aren’t,” she says. “But all those other roles (on a hit show) and all those other shows that get pushed aside or disappear, that’s work too. And those stories can’t be told without (us).”
“Nobody wants to go on strike,” adds Van Dyck. But she feels the industry is at a tipping point. And, “at a certain point you have to say, ‘No more’.”
NOT A HOBBY
Growing up in the Washington area, Kravits caught the theater bug early on, performing in a community theater when she was 10 or 11 years old. He studied drama in college and eventually made his way to New York and then Los Angeles.
In Los Angeles, he lucked out and landed a recurring role on David E. Kelley’s “The Practice.”
Kravits jokes that he would make a lot more money as a real lawyer, but he enjoys playing them. “I like to say that I play many lawyers, but never the same lawyer. I play a bad lawyer, a dumb lawyer, a funny lawyer, a hateful lawyer, an incompetent lawyer. Every role is different for me.” Most of the time, he’s on a one or two episode show.
Kravits says there used to be room for negotiation on everything, including billing and backstage, but not anymore: “You’re negotiating with Wall Street. And on Wall Street it’s all bottom line.”
The most difficult change has been with the largest royalties. “I don’t think people outside of the industry realize how important residual payments are in allowing themselves to be an actor,” he says.
And because streaming royalties are so meager, Kravits says he has broadcast shows he did 10, 15, even 20 years ago that still bring in more royalties than standout shows he’s done for streaming services in recent years, like HBO’s “The Undoing” or Netflix’s “Halston.”
“I didn’t decide to do this as a hobby,” says Kravits. “I can’t afford to do it as a hobby.”
CONSEQUENTIAL ACTIONS
The series finale that transformed the career of actress Diany Rodriguez, NBC’s “The Blacklist,” aired the same day Hollywood came to a standstill.
Rodriguez, who played Weecha, the bodyguard to James Spader’s star character, would have loved to take to social media and celebrate her character’s latest outing, but the strike made that impossible. She had several new projects lined up, but now she’s thrown into her duties as a local strike leader.
She sees the strike as part of a larger labor movement in the country: “I’m so in favor of this because it feels overwhelmingly (like) that we’re ready to take action to support what we’ve been talking about for the greater good.”
Rodríguez, 41, was born in Puerto Rico, grew up in Alabama, and moved from New York to Atlanta in 2009 to work in theater. Around that time, Georgia lawmakers passed generous movie tax credits, incentives that generated business but also led to a prolonged strike being felt sharply there.
“Atlanta’s economy is funded in large part off movie and television tax breaks,” she says.
Rodriguez feels financially secure, thanks in large part to her two-season stint on “The Blacklist,” the royalties the network gives her and the roles the show has helped her land since then.
But he says he could easily have been in the same situation as many of his fellow actors who are about to lose their health insurance, unable to earn enough in recent months to be eligible for Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) insurance plans.
WHAT WILL IT MEAN FOR PERFORMANCE?
Amari Dejoie’s father did not want her to do the same thing as him in entertainment. “They never do,” she jokes.
But Dejoie, who grew up in Los Angeles, caught the bug and began pursuing acting and modeling at age 17. Now 30, she studies acting, pays $400 a month for classes and takes whatever side job she can, including working as an extra. She has appeared in music videos and at events as a booth model. She is considering a job as a waitress to get by during the strike.
“My dad was part of SAG back in the day and his royalties paid for a house,” says Dejoie, who was at the rallies in Los Angeles last week. “It’s the same business and (yet) now it’s completely different.”
His father, Vincent Cook, was Will Smith’s boxing double on “Ali” and had a role on “BAPS” with Halle Berry. “He wasn’t a main character, but his residual payments were great and still are,” says Dejoie, noting that recently, after going through a health issue, his father discovered that SAG had a check waiting for him. “If it’s up to the studio, they’re not going to look for you to pay you. SAG will,” says Dejoie.
Dejoie also worries about how artificial intelligence will affect the industry and his job as an extra, where he earns around $150 a day to be available for background shots. The actors fear studios will want to scan their footage and use it repeatedly after paying for just one day’s work.
“Plus, if I’m not on set, I’m not making connections for other work,” says Dejoie.
More generally, the idea of actors’ images being artificially replicated makes her fear for the future of the industry in which she has just started.
“What will this mean for acting?” he says. “Did I just spend all this time and money on a job that will one day be obsolete?”
2023-07-24 18:21:20
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