Kerry Washington and Martin Sheen speak at rally for Hollywood strikers
The rally took place outside Disney Studios in Burbank, California.
Kerry Washington and Martin Sheen have delivered rousing speeches at a rally for striking Hollywood actors and writers.
“We are here because we know that unions matter,” said Washington, who played a political fixer in drama series Scandal. “Not only do we have solidarity within our union, we have solidarity between our unions, because we are workers.”
The rally outside Disney Studios in Burbank, California, coming more than a month into a strike by Hollywood actors and more than three months into a strike by screenwriters, was meant to highlight their alliance with the industry’s other guilds and the nation’s other unions, including the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO.
Sheen, who played the president for seven seasons on The West Wing, was joined by most of the show’s main cast members on the stage as he emphasised the toll being taken as the strikes stretch out.
“Clearly this union has found something worth fighting for, and it is very costly,” Sheen said. “If this were not so we would be left to question its value.”
“We deserve to be able to be paid a fair wage. We deserve to have access to healthcare. We deserve to be free from machines pretending to be us,” Washington said. “The dream of being working artist, the dream of making a living doing what we want to do, should not be impossible.”
The alliance of studios, streaming services and production companies that are the opposition in the strikes says it offered fair contracts to both unions before talks broke off that included unprecedented updates in pay and protections against AI.
Talks have restarted between the studios and writers, who went on strike on May 2, though progress has been slow. There have been no negotiations with actors since they went on strike on July 14.
