Noah Wyle on How Things Have Changed ‘In Every Way’ for Working Actors

Noah Wyle has been a regular on the picket lines since the WGA went on strike in May (SAG-AFTRA joined them, officially, with their own strike in July).

“I think there’s increased pressure to try and get to an endpoint,” Wyle tells Give Me My Remote in the video below. “These [SAG-AFTRA] waivers really have a big effect on everybody’s morale. [The] decision for Drew Barrymore to keep her show going I think was a catalytic event, and hopefully will bring more people out to remind everybody, those who are working and who aren’t, that we all stand on the shoulders of people who’ve been out here on these lines securing these protections for us to make those livelihoods that we are making.”

Wyle, who has led shows on network, cable, and streaming platforms, acknowledges the industry has changed “in every way” during his decades-long career.

“That’s part of the problem: that the entire model under which we make our product has changed,” he says. “Everything’s different except for the contracts with which we work under. Those get changed incrementally, by the smallest percentages, every three years. But in the last three years, the entire industry model has changed. So not only are we just asking for a fair contract based on the contract that started back in like 1960, we’re asking for something that reflects a little bit more the current climate and the playing field and the way the economics are being done now.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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With the actors’ strike now in its second month—and the AMPTP still not engaging with SAG-AFTRA to return to the negotiating table—“what worries me most about the tenor of these relationships is it no longer feels like an industry labor agreement,” Wyle says. “It feels like culture wars. It feels like this is corporate America trying to prove a point about how it can enter into any segment of society and become a disruptive change agent, eradicating everything that existed before and leaving in its wake something [that] sort of resembles a gig economy. Where everybody’s out hustling for themselves, without any kinds of protections, without any kind of collective bargaining strength, without any health care, pension, long-term planning strategy, can’t raise a family, can’t live on anything like that.”

“We’re not job workers; we’re artists, craftsmen,” he continues. “And we had an industry that predates all these others—it would be nice if they took a lesson from us.”

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