Bryan Cranston Tells Bob Iger ‘Our Jobs Will Not Be Taken Away’ by AI in Rousing Speech: You Will Not ‘Take Away Our Dignity’
By Joe Otterson
Bryan Cranston delivered a fiery speech at a SAG-AFTRA strike rally in Times Square on Tuesday, which included a message directed at Disney head Bob Iger. “We’ve got a message for Mr. Iger,” Cranston said from the stage of the “Rock the City for a Fair Contract” rally. “I know, sir, that you look [at] things through a different lens. We don’t expect you to understand who we are. But we ask you to hear us, and beyond that to listen to us when we tell you we will not be having our jobs taken away and given to robots. We will not have you take away our right to work and earn a decent living. And lastly, and most importantly, we will not allow you to take away our dignity! We are union through and through, all the way to the end!”
Watch an excerpt from the speech below Cranston began his remarks by saying that there is one thing that all the guilds and the AMPTP fundamentally agree on: “Our industry has changed exponentially.” “We are not in the same business model we were even 10 years ago,” he said. “And yet, even though they admit that is the truth in today’s economy, they are fighting us tooth and nail to stick to the same economic system that is outmoded, outdated! They want us to step back in time. We cannot and we will not do that.” Cranston was one of a number of stars who took the stage to address a crowd of hundreds of SAG-AFTRA members and union supporters at the rally, with others including Steve Buscemi, Wendell Pierce, Christian Slater, Christine Baranski, Stephen Lang, and Titus Burgess. They were joined onstage by fellow actors Michael Shannon, BD Wong, Brendan Fraser, Jessica Chastain, Matt Bomer, Chloë Grace Moretz, and Corey Stoll, and more. Burgess decided to forego a speech, instead singing a section of the song “Take Me to the World” from “Sondheim On Sondheim.” Baranski told the crowd “We will not live under corporate feudalism” while also praising the background actors on shows like “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight,” saying that she attended the rally to speak for them and demand they get fair treatment under any new contract. Slater then spoke about how his father, a fellow SAG member, received support from the union after mental illness and later cancer left him unable to work. Later on in the rally, “The Bear” star Liza Colón-Zayas told the audience that she has been a union member since 1994 and “struggled for 30 years to finally get here, only to find that my residuals have dwindled exponentially.” She then paraphrased Snoop Dogg by saying “We the artists, our gripe is that we deliver in high numbers, in major numbers. And yet, where the f— is my money?”
First, I want to say that AI is not the major issue, a complete change in business model is. AI is just a very salient way of communicating how much things have changed. It’s kind of cipher for the larger issues.
Within a certain context, AI could be fine. If someone generates AI models and a student film uses open source software and public domain libraries to make something with a shoestring budget, that’s great. The problem is when a studio takes the same budget, but pays what used to go to early career actors to their brother in law’s social media advertising business, and produces a show that looks shittier and dries up the pool of actors coming into the business, at which point the only main actors a generation later are celebrities kids.
I also agree that the financials should be far more evenly distributed. The base pay for lower billed actors should be higher, and the pay for higher billed actors lower. But the best way to do that is to force higher pay for lower billed actors.