Actor Billy Porter has given the verbal middle finger to the most powerful man in Hollywood — Disney CEO Bob Iger — in the latest sign of growing animosity between striking actors and writers, and their employers, Hollywood’s corporate elite.
Billy Porter — who starred in the FX series Pose, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company — told Bob Iger “fuck you” in an interview with Britain’s Evening Standard. The vulgar remark was in reaction to Iger’s recent comments that striking Hollywood actors are being “unrealistic.”
“I don’t have any words for it, but: fuck you,” Porter said about Iger. “That’s not useful, so I’ve kept my mouth shut. I haven’t engaged because I’m so enraged. I’m glad I’ve been over here [in London]. But when I go back I will join the picket lines.”
The stage and screen legend talks to Craig McLean about his trailblazing career, the financial toll of the writer’s strike and why post-divorce London is the perfect place for husband hunting https://t.co/r05oQquc7Z
— Evening Standard (@EveningStandard) August 6, 2023
Porter revealed that he is being forced to sell his house due to the ongoing SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild of America strikes, which have shut down most TV and movie production around the country. The openly gay actor is also going through a divorce from his husband, Adam Smith.
“I have to sell my house,” Porter said. “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.”
The double Hollywood strikes are turning into a war of attrition as corporate-owned studios hope to wait out the unrest as actors and writers burn through their personal savings.
A recent Deadline article quoted the anonymous Hollywood executive who said studios are deliberately dragging their feet on negotiations with the WGA “until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”
The comment provoked the ire of strikers, including Hollywood hot-head Ron Perlman, who publicly threatened the executive only to backtrack his comments.
Billy Porter participated in the 2020 Democrat National Convention (DNC), performing a bizarre interpretation of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.”
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