Brian Cox says actors’ strike could last until the end of the year

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The Succession star Brian Cox said the recently declared strike by Hollywood actors could get “very unpleasant” and last until the end of the year, taking actors “to the brink”.

In an interview on Friday with Sky News, the 77-year-old British actor said the decision by the Screen Actors Guild (Sag-Aftra) to call its 160,000 members to strike over issues such as residuals compensation and the use of AI in film and television “could get very, very unpleasant”. The strike, announced on Thursday, “could go on for quite some time. They’ll take us to the brink and we’ll probably have to go to the brink.

“So it may not be solved … until towards the end of the year,” he added.

He expressed support for the Writers Guild of America, whose 20,000 members have been on strike since May. Without writers, said Cox, “we have nothing … That’s why we have shows like White Lotus, like Succession …”

Both writers and actors had been negotiating with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) over payments when shows or films are repeated, called residuals. Streaming services such as Netflix have been able to grow massive audiences through libraries of films and shows while paying much less in residuals than broadcast television.

Cox criticized this system as “failing rapidly”, noting that broadcast residuals were vital for funding actors’ healthcare. “If our residuals go down it means our health insurance isn’t going to be met,” he said.

He added: “In a way, the streaming services have shot themselves in the foot because they’ve said, ‘oh, we’re going very well on this front.’ And when we called them to task and said ‘what about our residuals, what about our money?’, everything kind of closes down and … you know, it’s not going to happen.”

Cox also spoke to actors’ concerns about the use of AI in film and television production, such as using artificial intelligence to generate scripts, thus replacing writers, or generating an actor’s likeness without their consent. “We don’t know the extent to which it can operate,” he said. “It’s the boogeyman, it really is the boogeyman.”

The AMPTP has said it offered a “groundbreaking AI proposal which protects performers’ digital likenesses, including a requirement for performer’s consent for the creation and use of digital replicas or for digital alterations of a performance”. But Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, Sag-Aftra’s chief negotiator and national executive director, denounced that proposal on Thursday for only paying background performers for one day of work in exchange for the rights to their digital likeness “for the rest of eternity with no compensation”.

“If you think that’s a groundbreaking proposal, I suggest you think again,” he added.

On Friday, Cox said streaming services “could easily go and create AI, artificial intelligence programs, which would be a nonsense. There would never be an original voice,” citing such writers as the Succession creator Jesse Armstrong and Mike White, the creator and sole writer of The White Lotus. “It would be some kind of copy monkey of the show. And that is unacceptable.”