Dwayne Johnson Makes 7-Figure Donation to SAG-AFTRA Relief Fund

Dwayne Johnson presented his support for the SAG-AFTRA strike with a enormous donation for union users who are now out of operate.

The motion star, 51, contributed a 7-figure amount to the SAG-AFTRA Foundation’s relief fund, which can produce grants of up to $1,500 for every member. In other cases exactly where a union member is in significant jeopardy, a lifetime member could obtain up to $6,000 in crisis help.

The actual total of Johnson’s donation is private, but SAG-AFTRA Foundation president Courtney B. Vance said Johnson’s staff reached out immediately after the foundation sent a letter to the union’s optimum-earning associates outlining the monetary complications other members will experience through the strike.

“It was a enjoy fest,” Vance, 63, instructed Variety on Monday, July 24, recalling his cell phone phone with Johnson about the donation. “It’s like, ‘Man, you are stepping up in a way that is permitting other individuals to know the dire requirement of it.’ This is him declaring, ‘In these kinds of a time as this, I’m below and I’m not heading anyplace, whichever you require me to do.’ And that sends a substantial message to other individuals to do the very same detail.”

The foundation’s government director, Cyd Wilson, informed the outlet that Johnson’s donation is the “largest single donation” the corporation has at any time gained from a person person at a single time. (The SAG-AFTRA Basis is a nonprofit that’s affiliated with SAG-AFTRA but is impartial from the union.)

“And what is astounding is that that 1 verify is likely to assistance countless numbers of actors maintain food on their table, and maintain their little ones harmless, and retain their vehicles managing,” Wilson told Variety. “And it is not shed on me that [Dwayne’s] extremely humble about this, but it is a way to get us started off.”

The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) has been on strike considering that July 14 over an ongoing dispute with the Alliance of Movement Picture and Tv Producers (AMPTP). The union’s selection to strike arrived two months just after the Writers Guild of The usa also went on strike above problems like residuals from streaming content material and the use of artificial intelligence in scripts.

“This is a pretty seminal hour for us. I went in imagining that we would be in a position to avert a strike. The gravity of this move is not dropped on me,” SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher explained in a press meeting on July 13. “It’s a incredibly severe factor that impacts countless numbers — if not millions — of persons all across this country and close to the earth. Not only members of this union, but people today who do the job in other industries that assistance the people that do the job in this market. … We had no selection. We are the victims in this article. We are staying victimized by a incredibly greedy entity.”

The simultaneous strike marks the to start with time that the two the actors and writers unions have been on strike alongside one another because 1960. During that strike, former U.S. President Ronald Reagan was the president of SAG.

Tons of famous people have proven their assist for the two strikes, picketing outdoors studios in New York Metropolis and Los Angeles. Other stars, in the meantime, have been revealing the modest quantities they get paid in residuals from streaming.

Previously this thirty day period, Mandy Moore described that residuals could as soon as maintain actors involving jobs, but that’s progressively not the scenario.

“We’re in amazingly lucky positions as performing actors owning been on exhibits that discovered large good results in 1 way or one more … but many actors in our place for yrs right before us were capable to reside off of residuals or at minimum shell out their payments,” she told The Hollywood Reporter on July 18, incorporating that she obtained “very tiny, like, 81-cent checks” for streaming residuals for This Is Us.

Moore, 39, performed matriarch Rebecca Pearson on the NBC relatives drama, which ran from 2016 to 2022. She even further tackled the residual difficulty in an Instagram write-up soon after signing up for the picket line outdoors Disney earlier this thirty day period.

“Ours is a fickle industry and in my 20+ a long time of becoming a performer, my occupation has ebbed and flowed,” Moore wrote. “I’ve experienced pretty lean several years in which I could not get a job and those people are exactly the times when in yrs past, actors could rely on residuals from their past operate to assistance them get by. The world and business enterprise have improved and I’m hoping we can obtain a meaningful answer moving forward.”