Sean Astin has spent the past 44 years preparing for the two years that lie ahead of him. Following in the footsteps of his mother, Patty Duke, the “Lord of the Rings” star and longtime board and negotiating committee member of SAG-AFTRA is now the president of the actors’ union, and he’s already got a full plate.
Along with the ongoing push for protections against AI exploitation of performers and building a new compensation model around streaming services, Astin told TheWrap that there are several items on his presidential agenda beyond the headlines, including maintaining the guild’s health and pension plan amidst spiraling costs, strengthening the union’s relationships with talent agencies, and improving a casting process that has become a source of frustration for the working actors who make up the vast majority of the union’s membership.
And of course, there’s next summer’s TV/theatrical contract negotiations — the first since the union’s 118-day strike in 2023 — and the response that will have to be formulated to the forthcoming legal and financing battles between Netflix and Paramount over control of Warner Bros.
On the latter, Astin remained largely mum on details beyond the statement SAG-AFTRA put out on Friday in response to Warner choosing Netflix to enter exclusive acquisition talks, but he promised that should the streamer’s deal is approved, the guild was committed to “holding them to their word” that the merger would not lead to fewer opportunities for actors.
“We are not going to let whatever is happening with the clash of the titans in the studio acquisition wars have any impact on how we approach our negotiations,” Astin vowed. “We’re professionals. We care about delivering world-class performances, and we’re prepared to do that in whatever form it takes, no matter whose name is on the water tower.”
Read Astin’s interview with TheWrap below. The interview has been edited for clarity.
The potential merger between Warner Bros. and Netflix has been all that Hollywood has been talking about, and SAG-AFTRA has promised a thorough analysis of the deal. What does that analysis involve?
It’s impossible, when looking at a business deal that has this kind of impact that not to wonder how it’s going to impact our community. The thing [SAG-AFTRA] can focus on is our relationship with the companies in terms of the commitments that they make to us and that we make to each other.
So we can sit back and wonder aloud about theatrical windows or you can talk about whether or not monopolistic practices end up creating greater or fewer jobs. For my purposes, with the union, we just want to focus on the deal we’re going to make with them, making it the strongest deal possible, and basically holding them to their word they are saying that this is going to create more jobs. The proof will be in the pudding, and we’re going to make sure that we have our point of view and the interests of our members in the forefront of their minds and memorialized in our agreement.
Along with Netflix, jobs and AI, there’s a lot of other issues facing actors that don’t always end up in the headlines. What are some of those that are a big part of your agenda as president that you think deserve more attention?
Yeah, I have like 12 things that are my presidential priorities, and I’ve been spending the last few months trying to figure out how I can best implement them. Most of them already are in some way, a part of the daily operation of the organization. We’re a big operation. We have many constituencies. We have lots and lots of employees. We have a cadence of negotiating contracts that is incredibly brisk. But there are some big topline ones that affect all our members.
The Association of Talent Agents is a group with whom we used to have a well negotiated and well-honored exchange. For decades, that has not been the case. There’s been these general service agreements that performers work under with their agents, but it’s time to really get with the agents and work with them and make sure that the practices that are being used in representing members are consistent and fair.
That’s a process that isn’t done by itself, so I’m working hard with our insider organization to figure out the best way to do that, and I think our members are going to be thrilled when they see that their union is taking seriously what their relationship is with their agents. It’s a tricky piece of the business where agents are representing lots of people who may be in competition to get a certain part and there should be some guidelines around how those situations are handled.
There’s also a lot of negativity within the membership about how the casting platforms work, and what their experience is, their professional experiences. Some of the casting directors and some of the casting mechanisms are really, really thoughtful, but there are a lot that aren’t, and so we want to improve that whole process. We want to work to improve our relationship with them. We probably can do that in bargaining with the companies, but we’re also looking at other ways that we may be able to better protect our members and their experience in the casting process.
The pension and health plan situation is also one of great importance to our members, so we internally have a process that we have to contend with. You know, a lot of our members don’t, or the public don’t really understand or know how the plans work, and they just figure it’s all one thing. It’s all one apparatus. But it’s not, so the members elect me and the board, and we have our oversight, and so trying to improve the conditions, the accessibility of the health care and the quality the pensions, and that’s oversight which requires real focus.
Then there’s the AI front, which really has multiple fronts. As we near the end of 2025, where does the union’s campaign on AI protections currently stand?
You know, the way you talked about artificial intelligence is interesting, because it’s kind of the way in which a lot of our members talk about it. I know you only referenced it quickly, but it’s a category…a category that has an extraordinary amount of information and complexity to it.
In our case, we have a lot of members who are elected to serve on committees, who have a lot of experience with tech and a lot of insight, and have spent a lot of time getting to know this environment and making sure that the professional staff in our organization have full access to what they’re saying and doing. That’s a process, but we want to make sure that happens. We also want to make sure that, there’s legislation all over the country on the federal and state level, and we continue to stay in the vanguard of helping draft the legislation and have input in the language of the law of the bills.
And on the contract side, AI has been a part of the medley of agreements you’ve negotiated since the TV/Theatrical strike ended, most notably the Interactive Media Agreement which had a strike of its own around AI. How do those multiple contracts help you keep up with the rapid evolution of AI and the way it is used and misused?
I was on the team that negotiated the animation and the commercial contracts, and I paid very close attention to the interactive media negotiation but there’s other ones like our net code, even all of our broadcast contracts… but with every single negotiation, you try and improve the language.
In the animation contract, for example, we secured something that we’d somehow not achieved in the TV/Theatrical contract. We got language explaining, in no uncertain terms, that the contract that was being signed was between the companies and human beings. Getting the words “human beings” into the contract language was shockingly difficult, but once we achieved it there, we were able to roll it over to other contracts like the commercial contract.
In fact, I think the companies, the JPC [Joint Policy Committee], when it came to the commercial contract, I think they’re relieved to see that the language had been hammered out previously, because all of those ideas, particularly in this novel AI environment, and the impact of the ideas in bargaining are not always so clear. We’re making educated guesses about what’s going to happen over the course of the contract, but the technology is changing minute by minute. And with those changes there’s greater understanding about what the technical capabilities are and how the technologies are being used. The parties are well aware of those dynamics, so you just keep trying to make more effective, more comprehensive, more transparent provisions as you go along.
A big part of all of these contracts has been ironing out not just how performers are protected from unauthorized use of their work in AI but how and when they are compensated, including whether they are paid for their performances being used to train models. How has that developed?
When companies exhibit our material, they are deploying what we’ve contractually agreed to, what we’ve delivered, our performances. They have to honor a contract with us. There’s a way in which ingesting the material from our performances into the models for training is a form of exhibition of our work that isn’t being reported and we are not being given the opportunity to approve of its use, which was not contemplated beforehand. This is a radical new thing that people are trying to do with our stuff, and they need to get our permission and compensate us.
This is part of the conversation surrounding legislation that has to do with synthetic performers and ill-gotten data. You talk about different people who are creating new characters and doing new renderings and stuff, and as far as they’re concerned, it’s all just fine, but they’re not somehow accountable to the theft of our data, our name, likeness and image, our movements, things that are proprietary towards us. And if it’s not completely clear to the industry whether or not it’s proprietary, that’s what we’re getting policy to clarify. Politicians are very quick to agree to create guardrails when they realize that their name, image and likeness can be used and depicted in such ways that they would never have agreed to. When people realize that they can be victimized by technology, it adds a layer of appreciation for how professional performers feel when their stuff gets improperly used.
There’s a lot of discussion about tracking and tracing and embedding and data watermarking and finding some way so that, you know, individuals out in the wild don’t happen upon something where their image is captured, or their likeness, or their sound is captured, or probably captured, is pretty close. I spend many, many hours learning from members what their experience is, and then learning from experts about how we’re trying to get a handle on this technology. What I would say is I’m personally no longer interested in being overwhelmed by the onslaught of artificial intelligence. It’s much more interesting to me to stay focused on what we can do to protect our members.
Let’s shift over to this streaming compensation fund which just launched three months ago. How has that been going in its early stages, and what can you tell us about when members might start receiving some payments from that fund?
Well, it’s taken longer to deploy the money than we would have preferred. But having said that, the people who qualify for it are going to get paid, and that money is flowing now or imminently. We have to get the companies and the union to agree on the nitty gritty details of how it’s going to be implemented through a trustee group that responds to standing committees on each side.
I think the pain point for our members is that the residual structure is leaving. Broadcast television has been decimated, and it’s taken the unions and industry a long time to accept responsibility for that. But I think we’ve communicated to the companies and to the public that every single month, streaming subscribers are paying money, every single month of every single year for product that we participate in and continues to be exhibited and viewed on these services over and over and over again. The idea that the studios purchase the labor when you shoot and have satisfied their obligation does not recognize the contribution that we make. If you buy a stock and the stock performs over decades, you expect to continue to receive the dividends and the value of that existence and the maturation of that stock.
Well, that’s what we’re doing. We’re investing our time, energy and money and our passion and our talent in these careers, and we established a right to continue to participate in the same way that the companies are participating. So trying to disparage actors and performers by suggesting that they’ve done the work, they’ve gotten paid and they should go home by correlating it to other jobs where that may be the case is inappropriate.
The residual and syndication system that has existed for decades was a recognition of that continued value of what creatives bring, right?
Yeah, I mean, there’s advertisers in that scenario, and you would talk about when it got to syndication how much ad time could they sell. Now it looks like advertising is coming into the streaming business, so we’re gonna have to continue to stay nimble and make sure that our compensation doesn’t become devalued or diminished just because they changed their business model every 10 minutes. But the conversation hasn’t credited the investment of the performer and there should be a recognition of it, of our investment, in the same way that the studios continue to enjoy their investment every time they get subscription dollars.
On top of that, what about those shows that perform out of the stratosphere, those shows that are household names? Common sense dictates when you have a show like “Stranger Things,” or “Squid Games,” surely those performers are getting a little something more because it was a galactic hit. Perhaps if they individually bargained on overscale pay, but usually they’re not. But I think people assume that actors who are negotiating overscale do better for themselves when it comes to success participation, and the bonus we are trying to build in future negotiations is meant to reflect that the people who made it the successful thing that it is, should always participate in that success a little bit more.
To take this back to Netflix, a common fear that we have heard from actors and talent agents since the Warner deal was announced is that if this deal leads to Netflix successfully shortening theatrical windows, that could lead to the demise of back-end deals. With that concern now rising, do you foresee films and their streaming performance becoming a part of this compensation fund?
I don’t like the idea of having to choose between those two things. As long as there’s theatrical, we’re going to push to participate in its back-end success. As long as there is streaming, we’re going to push to participate in its continuing success. My job as president of the union is to focus on the things that I can accomplish.
It’s so emotional to think about what it would mean to diminish the moviegoing experience, but my job is to think about the lives and the health and the welfare of the members of this union. There’s always been mergers and acquisitions, consolidations and bankruptcies and all sorts of business mechanics that affect what gets made, how it gets made, where it gets shown, how people can experience it. We’re in the same boat with everybody else. We want to see high-quality content, and we want our members to be able to fly their craft and follow their passion and make sure that the business we are a part of is fair and equitable.
We are not going to let whatever is happening with the clash of titans in the studio acquisition wars have any impact on how we approach our negotiations and how we approach doing our work. We’re professionals. We care about delivering world-class performances, and we’re prepared to do that whatever form it takes, no matter whose name is on the water tower.
Let’s close by talking about the other big issue here in Los Angeles, which is production flight. SAG-AFTRA was part of the lobbying for the California tax credit expansion and has been lobbying for a federal production tax credit, but what is being done on the local level in terms of reform for permitting rules and fees and other measures to make Hollywood a more favorable place to shoot again?
I am incredibly proud of the Los Angeles Government Affairs and Public Policy Committee that I chair. We have facilitated several meetings at our headquarters with city council members and other members of municipal governments where we peppered them with questions and shared stories and testimony to demonstrate that this is still a union town.
When it comes to the fact that if you work in one part of town, you have to deal with one municipality for permitting and another one in another place, and all the rules that come with parking and street regulations … I think that’s all starting to slowly change. And the public perception of filming is changing too. It used to be, “Oh my gosh. Every street has something filming on it, and it’s such an inconvenience.” I think by and large, if people see a production filming in your neighborhood now, they’re like, “Oh, wow, that’s cool. That’s a movie shooting in my town.” And I want to command all of the unions who’ve worked in the city to try and make sure that our story is understood.
The fact is, this is Hollywood. Los Angeles is the epicenter of the roots of American entertainment, movie, television entertainment, and we’re losing it. It’s going away. And if our community doesn’t stand up and demand that our government help us and remove some of the obstacles that have grown up over time, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.