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      Actors are Turning to Cameo Amid SAG-AFTRA Strike

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      Others are using the service, through which fans can pay for personalized videos, to engage with followers while not publicly promoting work.On July 24 Cheyenne Jackson, an actor, posted a photo on Instagram that showed him shirtless, with glistening abs, veiny arms and his lips parted.“This is me subtly letting you know I’m back on @cameo,” its caption read.Cameo is a service through which celebrities and others can be paid to make personalized videos commemorating birthdays, bachelorette parties, divorces and the like. Mr. Jackson, who has appeared in the “American Horror Story” TV shows and in “30 Rock,” said in a phone interview that he reactivated his account because of the continuing strike by SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union.Mr. Jackson, 48, charges $95 for a video message and cited bills — “I have two kids” — as one reason he is on Cameo. “There are only so much sources of income,” he said.“My husband cringed a little,” he added. “But you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”Since Cameo debuted in 2016, some actors have used it when traditional work has dried up. In 2021, as the pandemic raged, the actor Andrew Rannells joined Cameo to raise money for the Entertainment Community Fund, a nonprofit formerly known as the Actors Fund. On a recent episode of “And Just Like That…,” the “Sex and the City” reboot, the character Che Diaz, played by Sara Ramirez, starts making Cameo videos after a TV pilot is canceled.According to data provided by Cameo, there was a 137 percent increase in the number of accounts reactivated or created on Cameo in July compared to June (the strike started on July 14). The number of orders for videos remained about the same for each month, but Cameo said orders usually drop in July because there aren’t events like graduations and holidays like Father’s Day.Some of the new and reactivated accounts were for people unaffected by the strike, but others were for union actors like Mr. Jackson and Alyssa Milano. Fran Drescher, the SAG-AFTRA president, also reactivated her account, according to Cameo, though it is not currently accepting bookings.The actress Alyssa Milano, who charges $250 for a video message on Cameo, said she was using the service as an income supplement while traditional work has dried up.via CameoThe actress Christa B. Allen said she reactivated her Cameo account as a way to engage with fans at a time when she is making fewer public appearances.via CameoMs. Milano, 50, who charges $250 for a video message, said in an email that Cameo “is a great way to supplement some income during this idle time.” Ms. Drescher’s representatives said she was unavailable to comment for this article.While the actors’ union is on strike, its members are forbidden from filming most projects and from promoting most projects at movie premieres, film festivals and events like Comic-Con. But making Cameo videos, for the most part, is allowed, said Sue-Anne Morrow, the national director of contract strategic initiatives and podcasts at SAG-AFTRA.“As long as there’s no promotion of struck work within the Cameo, there’s no problem,” Ms. Morrow said in an email.In May, around the time that movie and television writers’ unions went on strike, the actors’ union finalized a deal with Cameo that allows its members to have earnings from certain bookings applied toward their health insurance minimum earnings requirement, Ms. Morrow said. Those bookings must be made through Cameo 4 Business, where corporate customers like insurance companies and grocery store chains hire talent for promotional videos.Ms. Morrow said that the union pursued the agreement because Cameo is one of many ways actors can support themselves when they’re not acting.The average price of a Cameo 4 Business booking is $1,700, said Steven Galanis, a founder of Cameo and its chief executive. Non-business bookings — the types of videos Cameo is most known for — average $70. Cameo receives 25 percent of the fee for any booking, and the rest goes to the talent.Mr. Galanis compared the opportunity created by the strike for Cameo to the period of time in the early pandemic when, as he put it, “every other income sort of dried up” for actors and other entertainers. “I’m hoping that the strike ends tomorrow,” he said. “But if it doesn’t, we’re going to be here.”On July 18, days after the actors’ union went on strike, Cameo announced a round of layoffs, which happened a little more than a year after the company laid off 87 workers in May 2022. Mr. Galanis declined to comment on the number of people affected by the recent layoffs, or on the number of people now working at Cameo.Some actors who have started reusing the service since the strike said that making money was not the only reason that they returned to it. Christa B. Allen, who has appeared in the TV show “Revenge” and in the film “13 Going on 30,” said that Cameo offers an opportunity to engage with fans at a time when she is making fewer public appearances.“We’re nothing without our fans,” she said. Cameo, she added, lets actors “connect with the people that love them and have supported their career in a time when they’re not going to be making traditional media.”Ms. Allen, 31, who uses the stage name Christa Belle, reactivated her Cameo account during the strike after using it sporadically since 2017. She charges $75 per booking and said she has made about $1,000 to date.“Cameo is not something I think of as a moneymaker,” she said. More

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      A Times Reporter on the SAG-AFTRA Actors’ Strike and Hollywood’s Future

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      Lights. Camera. Action? Brooks Barnes, who covers the entertainment business, discussed the state of film and television amid an industrywide shutdown.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.It was around 1 a.m. one Thursday last month when Brooks Barnes received the email he’d been waiting up for.“SAG-AFTRA TELEVISION, THEATRICAL AND STREAMING CONTRACTS EXPIRE WITHOUT A DEAL,” read the subject line on the email, sent by a union representative.Movie studios and unionized actors failed to reach a deal after weeks of negotiations. Hours later, members of SAG-AFTRA’s national board voted to strike, and tens of thousands of actors joined the screenwriters already on the picket lines over issues including pay. The decision brought film and television productions to a standstill and left the fate of Hollywood hanging in the balance.“When something big like this happens, you just have to put down everything else you’re working on,” said Mr. Barnes, a reporter who covers Hollywood for The New York Times. In an interview, he shared his thoughts on Hollywood’s first industrywide shutdown in more than 60 years and on how the repercussions may be coming to a theater near you. This interview has been edited.What do unionized actors want?There’s a long list of things; their proposals are detailed and specific, down to what a background dancer gets paid for rehearsal time, for example. But the main sticking point is that actors want residual payments from streaming services.In the traditional model, actors would get paid for the work that they do on a TV show or movie; they would get paid residuals once that show or movie was resold as a rerun on TV. Sometimes the residual money could be huge, depending on a show’s popularity.In the streaming era, that model has changed. Actors still get paid a residual for streaming work. But it’s essentially a flat fee. Actors want those payments to be based on a show’s popularity — more for a hit like “Stranger Things,” for example, and less for something that flops.The other big sticking point is artificial intelligence. Actors want guardrails so their likenesses will not be reused digitally without their approval and a payment.Using an actor’s likeness without their consent makes me think of a recent “Black Mirror” episode, in which characters’ likenesses were used in bizarre ways without their permission.That’s exactly what this is about, but it’s also to protect background actors. In a crowd scene, they might scan a background actor’s likeness and reuse it in another movie just to populate the scene. It doesn’t have to be Salma Hayek or Tom Cruise.How does the writers’ strike fit into all this?The writers are on strike for similar issues, including residual payments. Writers are also looking for a type of quota system; they want studios to staff a writers’ room with a minimum number of writers. Streaming services often use minirooms, a type of writers’ room used early in the show-development process that involves half as many writers. Basically, they’re doing much of the same work with fewer people. The union wants protections against those job cuts. How soon will we see the repercussions of the actors’ strike?Viewers won’t see too many repercussions for a while because the assembly pipelines work so far in advance; a lot of upcoming TV series and films are already finished. But some big movies planned for Christmas have been pushed to next year, and the fall TV schedule will be heavy on reality shows and reruns. Actors are also not allowed to promote any of the work that they have already finished. And that’s crucial to studios; they want actors on talk shows and podcasts to promote their projects.You recently wrote about a factor that’s contributing to the strikes: the absence of a power broker to help mediate.Yes, the last Hollywood strike took place in 2007-8. In those days, it was a simpler business; Netflix was mostly an indie company and had just begun streaming. Back then, there were studio elders and senior statesmen who could come in and say, OK, let’s iron this out and get back to work. That kind of person doesn’t exist so much anymore.Why not?Companies just have different cultures and priorities — a Netflix versus a Disney versus an Apple. The other reason is some of the studio executives who could mediate have had problems. Bob Iger, Disney’s chief executive, has become a bit of a villain for comments he made about the strike on CNBC, so he’s not really the greatest person to generate trust. You need someone whom both sides trust, respect and will listen to.I wonder about your thoughts on the success of “Barbenheimer” at the box office. It feels bittersweet.It’s exciting to know that Hollywood can still deliver these kinds of cultural thunderclaps, but the reality is the reality: The hits are few and far between. And it’s hard to feel very good about the business when hundreds of thousands of people are on strike or impacted by the strikes. More

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      In ‘Passages,’ ‘Sex Is a Huge Part of a Character’s Life’

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      The three stars of Ira Sachs’ new movie — Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos — discuss the graphic film’s approach to sexuality and intimacy.When Ira Sachs’ new movie “Passages” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, critics couldn’t stop talking about the sex scenes. The movie, a drama set in Paris about a film director who leaves his longtime boyfriend for a young woman, featured an all-star European art-house cast — Franz Rogowski (“Transit,” “Great Freedom”), Ben Whishaw (“The Lobster,” “Little Joe”) and Adèle Exarchopoulos (“Blue is the Warmest Color”) — negotiating infidelity and betrayal. And having graphic sex.Those scenes led the M.P.A. to give the film a surprise NC-17 rating. The filmmakers opted to release the film in the United States without such a classification, a move that may limit the number of theaters willing to show the film when it comes out on Aug. 4.There has been fierce debate in recent years about the role of sex scenes in movies. Following the MeToo movement’s reckoning with gender inequality and sexual misbehavior, some have asked whether it is still possible to film such intimate acts without putting performers into precarious situations. More recently, some Gen-Z social media users have argued that sex scenes are unnecessary and should be excised from cinema more broadly.In two joint video interviews, between Whishaw and Rogowski, and Rogowski and Exarchopoulos, the actors discussed their experiences making the movie and its approach to sexuality and intimacy. (The interview with Whishaw, who is a member of SAG-AFTRA, was conducted before the actors’ strike began.)Exarchopoulos noted that her career had been shaped early on by the depiction of sex onscreen. One of her first films, “Blue is the Warmest Color,” a portrait of a lesbian relationship that won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013, faced pushback from some critics who argued that the film’s graphic sex scenes objectified its stars. Exarchopoulos and her co-star, Léa Seydoux, later said that the director’s treatment of them during the shoot had made them feel uncomfortable and disrespected.Nevertheless, Exarchopoulos said she believed that sex scenes — and those of “Passages” in particular — were often crucial to movies for depicting relationships. “Sex is a huge part of a character’s life,” she said. “Blue is the Warmest Color” had taught her “how having sex, or not having sex, and your relationship with your body, is a conversation and says a lot about who you are and who you are trying to be,” she said.Her character in “Passages” — a schoolteacher named Agathe who embarks on an affair with Tomas (Rogowski), after meeting him at a wrap party for his film — wants to “test her limits,” she said. As an actress, the biggest challenge was finding new ways of depicting intimacy onscreen, given her early performance in “Blue is the Warmest Color” and its emphasis on sex: “I don’t want to bore people, showing myself the same way,” she said.Ben Whishaw, left, plays Martin, a graphic designer who Rogowski’s character abandons.SBS ProductionsRogowski is also no stranger to revealing roles: He said he had felt pressured into appearing naked in previous film and theater projects to add what he described as an “edgy” element to a production. He felt ambivalent about those experiences, he said. “The problem wasn’t the sex scene; it was that these movies were pretentious and flat, and you can’t turn it into something real just by taking off your underwear.”Perhaps the most talked about sex scene in “Passages” occurs when Martin, Whishaw’s character, and Tomas end up in bed together after a series of betrayals. Rogowski said that the sequence was notable beyond its graphic nature, for its emotional depiction of two long-term partners negotiating power and pain through sex.“It’s a couple having sex, it’s someone in a position of a victim taking over,” Rogowski said. “I think if someone only sees the film’s sex scenes as just explicit scenes of intercourse, then they should just watch another movie.”In recent years, Whishaw said, the more widespread use of intimacy coordinators — experts who help performers negotiate their potential discomfort during sex scenes — has created a healthier atmosphere for actors, including himself. Before “this development, the actors were sort of left to do it for themselves, because the director was embarrassed, or didn’t know how to talk about it.”For “Passages,” he added, the cast opted not to use such a coach. “I think it’s OK if the group of people filming a scene are cool with doing it among themselves,” he said. “It’s about respect and trust and sharing creative goals.”The film is also notable for the unremarkable way it treats Tomas’s apparent bisexuality as he negotiates relationships with Agathe and Martin. That approach, Exarchopoulos said, played a large part in attracting her to the part. “It’s very normal in my own life and circles,” she said, for people to have relationships with either sex. Rogowski added that such love affairs were also commonplace in Berlin, where he lives. “I know it’s a cliché about Berlin, but some clichés are true,” he said.Rogowski’s character, a tyrannical film director prone to on-set outbursts who frequently manipulates others to suit his own needs, reminded Exarchopoulos of colleagues she had encountered on movie sets, she said. “During the shoot, people in the production can sometimes be childish and have an ego, because they have power,” she said. “I have a lot of empathy for them.”Tomas’s headstrong nature is reflected in his character’s gender-forward fashion choices.MUBIAt first, Rogowski said, he struggled to identify with Tomas. “When I read the script, I thought, ‘This is a tough one, how am I going to justify his behavior?’” he said, adding that he eventually found the character’s lack of conventional morality to be liberating.“A moral code is a kind of costume, and it’s interesting to change this costume,” Rogowski said. “For me personally, morality is a shady friend. It is related to religion and power structures, and it is, in many ways, a way of avoiding having your own opinion and exploring life.”Rogowski said he believed that the notion of labeling film directors or actors as egocentric, or narcissists, is often a way of dismissing the value of their work. “Most of us have lost our relationships with ourselves, and don’t have enough time to be inspired by ourselves,” he said. “Most of us should be a bit more narcissistic.”He added that Tomas’s headstrong nature is reflected in his character’s gender-forward fashion choices, which include some of the more memorable looks in recent art house cinema. Rogowski said was pleasantly surprised by his high-fashion outfits — which include a see-through sweater, a snakeskin jacket and a sheer crop-top — chosen by the film’s costume designer, Khadija Zeggaï. “I still have some of those items in my wardrobe,” he said.The crop-top makes a particularly memorable appearance in a tense scene midway through the film, when Agathe invites her button-down, middle-class parents to meet her new boyfriend — a meal that grows increasingly disastrous by each passing minute. “It’s a nightmare,” Rogowski said. “I would have put on the most heteronormative T-shirt I could have found, just to make sure they are happy.”Whishaw chimed in: “But what a wonderful thing that he does that.” Even though “there is a lot of pain in the film, there is joy underneath,” he said. “Everything is mixed up in this intricate way, and I think that’s what gives the film its soul.” More

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      Pee-wee Herman Was Exuberant. Paul Reubens Kept Things Quiet.

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      Speaking with the actor was an entirely different experience than watching him play his career-defining character.Pee-wee Herman was noisy. He was boisterous. He had a voice that would shoot up several decibels without warning, whether he was inviting his TV viewers to play a game of connect the dots or interrogating his friends about the whereabouts of his missing bicycle. The mysterious nature of his character — was he supposed to be a man, a child or a man pretending to be a child? — seemed to excuse his exuberant energy and excessive volumes, and he, in turn, gave that same permission to his audience. Like he told us on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” his kids’ show that wasn’t really just for kids, “You all know what to do when anyone says the secret word, right?” That’s right: “Scream real loud!”Paul Reubens, who created and played Pee-wee Herman for more than 40 years, and who died on Sunday at the age of 70, was quiet. It wasn’t simply that he had a gentle manner or a decidedly un-Pee-wee-like reluctance to call attention to himself — he also had a natural speaking voice that was soft enough to be drowned out by a passing breeze. As Reubens told me when I first interviewed him in 2004, he was aware of this duality, between what his spirited alter ego promised and what he delivered in person, out of character. Fans might have expected Pee-wee levels of intensity, but face-to-face, he said, “Now I’m kind of like this. Putting people to sleep.”There was not much mystery about Reubens, which seemed to be how he wanted it. Without the gray suit and red bow tie, he was just a guy who appreciated kitschy toys, vintage children’s television shows and making people laugh. His liveliness and creativity were expressed through Pee-wee, whom he portrayed in his own media projects and in late-night interviews. Even in the minor movie roles and TV gigs he did before Pee-wee went big-time, he was still pretty much playing the Herman character.These days we intuitively understand the distinction between the public and private lives of celebrities, between what they wish us to see and what we might later learn about them. Reubens didn’t just draw a bright line between Pee-wee and Paul; he completely compartmentalized them and, for a time, had us happily believing they were distinct individuals. His beloved persona was so much his own independent entity that, in the closing credits of works like “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” Pee-wee Herman is simply billed as “HIMSELF.”Perhaps that’s what made Reubens’s 1991 arrest for indecent exposure so jarring: Beyond its reminder that he and Herman were not the same person, there was the disconcerting possibility that the wholesome Pee-wee would be punished for his creator’s offense. In the aftermath, Reubens wondered if the character would just be obliterated, sending him back “to my total anonymous civilian life,” as he told me in an interview in 2010.At that time, Reubens was preparing to bring “The Pee-wee Herman Show” to Broadway, and he seemed less concerned with how his past scandals had affected him than how they might have tarnished the title character.“I wrecked it to some degree, you know?” he said. “It got made into something different. The shine got taken off it.”None of this appeared to matter to his fans, who shouted out their proclamations of love and loyalty — to Pee-wee Herman — while I watched him walk the streets of Manhattan in his traditional costume. A few days later, having reverted to Paul Reubens, he seemed genuinely surprised by all the affection. In a voice as soft as can be, he said the experience was “so weird and so great at the same time.”“It was odd, and it was fantastic,” he said. “Both, rolled into one.” More

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      Review: In ‘Amour,’ Putting a Palme d’Or Winner Onstage

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      An adaptation of Michael Haneke’s 2012 movie at the Salzburg Festival eschews cinematic realism, instead taking a highly stylized approach.“How can I speak of love when I’m dead?” runs a powerful line in “Amour,” a stage adaptation of Michael Haneke’s 2012 film that premiered on Sunday at the Salzburg Festival, in Austria.Love and death are, of course, the two great themes of art, but rarely have they been brought together so hauntingly as in Haneke’s film, a portrait of an elderly couple forced to confront the issue of when life is no longer worth living. Told in Haneke’s characteristically severe style, the film earned the Austrian director both a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar for best foreign language film.Karin Henkel, the adaptation’s director, eschews the film’s realism, opting instead for a highly stylized and self-consciously artificial staging that achieves its visceral impact through a combination of Brechtian estrangement techniques, emotionally naked performances and biographical monologues written by onstage extras.Henkel scored a triumph in Salzburg two summers ago with “Richard the Kid and the King,” a sweeping epic of Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty monarch that ran to four hours. The German director’s “Amour” — a co-production with the Münchner Kammerspiele theater, in Munich, where it will run in late October — is as affectingly tender as her earlier Salzburg outing was grimly savage.At the beginning of the production, the stage is dominated by a white tunnel, whose pristine, antiseptic interior is progressively sullied: Its walls written on with watery black paint, its floor stained by thick black ink that trickles onto the performers, and mounds of dry earth that fall in heaps from the ceiling. One of the characters reclines on a metal-frame hospital bed that begins to resemble a medieval torture device when operated by a zealous nurse.The tunnel, with its clinical associations, is eventually dismantled, revealing an unadorned stage strewn with an assortment of chairs, a piano, microphone stands and stage lights. Muriel Gerstner’s stage design is a constant negotiation between sterile everyday objects (harshly lit by Stephan Mariani) and elemental imagery of earth, water and flowers.Like the film, however, this reimagining of “Amour” is anchored by its two central performances. Unlike the film, which starred two aging French cinema greats, the stage version is ignited by a dose of counterintuitive casting.Jung is 69 and Bach, 38. In Haneke’s movie, the actors who played their characters were in their mid-80s. Matthias HornKatharina Bach, who is just 38, brings unexpected vitality and deep pathos to her portrayal of Anne, an elderly music teacher who is paralyzed by a stroke. (Emmanuelle Riva was in her mid-80s when she played the same role in Haneke’s movie.) Bach’s is a fitful and tormented performance, marked by intense physical and dramatic control. As Georges, Anne’s still-vigorous husband, André Jung, 69, brings an embittered and defiant spirit that is a thoughtful departure from Jean-Louis Trintignant’s pained and subtle performance in the film.The German-language stage adaptation, by Henkel and the dramaturg Tobias Schuster, hews closely to the French screenplay. At the same time, they employ strategies to defamiliarize the piece. The dialogue is heightened by frequent, often uncanny repetition. And many of the script’s stage directions are read out loud by two actors, Joyce Sanhá and Christian Löber, whose limber performances — as narrators, nurses and other characters — add to the production’s anxious, off-kilter energy.Henkel’s greatest gamble is including a twelve-person chorus of nonprofessional extras. Each of them is old, infirm or in mourning, and, although they don’t speak much onstage, they have written moving testimonies about living with health conditions, or losing loved ones to illness that are recited as monologues by the main cast. In the wrong directorial hands, this sort of intervention could easily have curdled into sentimentality. Here, however, the emotional charge of these testimonies is balanced by understatement and restraint. By a similar token, the production’s depiction and discussion of euthanasia, while sometimes shocking, resists moralizing.Hovering somewhere between the cast of extras and the main performers is the actress Nine Manthei, a little girl who acts as an ambiguous intermediary. Is she a protecting angel? The personification of Anne’s soul? Along with Bach’s skillful performance, Manthei’s poise and onstage presence suggests a double exposure of Anne as an old woman and a child.“Old age might be tragic, but it is not individual,” we hear Haneke’s voice say in an excerpt from an interview about “Amour” that plays during the production.More than a decade ago, Haneke employed his formal austerity and emotional restraint to immerse us in one elderly couple’s tragedy. But where film encourages realism, theater can embrace allegory and abstraction. With her sensitive, at times idiosyncratic, approach to this same material, Henkel uses her theatrical artistry to reach the universal.AmourThrough Aug. 10 at the Salzburg Festival, in Salzburg, Austria; salzburgerfestspiele.at. More

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      Book Review: ‘A Pocketful of Happiness,’ by Richard E. Grant

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      The Oscar-nominated actor’s new memoir is at once a Hollywood air kiss and a moving tribute to a happy marriage that ended too soon.A POCKETFUL OF HAPPINESS, by Richard E. GrantRichard E. Grant is a wonderful actor and, it seems, a rather wonderful (goofy, talented, loving) man. His new memoir, written in diary form, is about his terrific 38-year marriage-of-opposites to Joan Washington (he the eternal adolescent, star-struck optimist and gifted actor, she a sharp-tongued, no-nonsense and equally gifted dialect coach) and her painful death from cancer. (It is she who, while dying, instructs him to seek a “pocketful of happiness” every day after she is gone.)Grant writes: “Am wondering, at the age of 63, and 11 months, if I am ever going to be a proper grown-up.” It’s not a question I asked myself while reading this book. He is so open, so filled with feelings and giddy with delight when loved, noticed and/or praised. (He not only writes about every exciting detail of being Oscar-nominated for his extraordinary performance in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” he then quotes various journalists and publicists about the charm and disarming candor of his enthusiasm. And then there are a few more quotes from friends who tell him how gifted and wonderful he is, as he ultimately does not win the Academy Award.) But he is too thrilled with all this to hold any of it against him, even as the Hollywood sections take away from the intensity of the book.If Richard E. Grant were writing a review of this moving memoir, there would be many, many fond and admiring adjectives used to describe almost everyone who appears in the pages: witty, forthright, feisty, silky-soft, button-bright, hilarious, loving, generous, heartbreaking, warmhearted, inclusive, brilliant, sparky, amazing, charming, gilded, entertaining.He lavishes these adjectives on his friends, famous and otherwise. Nigella Lawson seems as warm and lovely and sensitive as I’ve always thought she must be. Rupert Everett is gallant and delightful. So is King Charles, as it turns out. And Queen Camilla is thoughtful and generous. Cate Blanchett sends gardenias. Gabriel Byrne brings charm and kind attention. A frail Vanessa Redgrave provides ice cream and recites poetry. (It is a certain pleasure when Grant makes a very rare negative remark, usually about someone he tactfully does not name.)Washington and Grant at a 2016 awards ceremony.Getty ImagesThere are two women at the center of this sweet and openhearted book. One is Joan Washington, whom we get to know as passionate and commanding, a great teacher, a wonderful mother, a smartass and a woman who understood and loved her husband, deeply. I would have been happy to go on reading about their life and their marriage, and even their shared adoration of their “longed-for, miracle, baby,” Olivia, who seems to be an impressive woman, very supportive of them both, during the fears and misery of Washington’s Stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis and the “tsunami of grief” that Grant describes. I was not happy to read the details of Joan’s diagnosis and dying, but those sections of the book are genuine and compelling.The woman in the book whom I could easily do without is … Barbra Streisand. Barbra Streisand comes off well: shy, thoughtful, wildly gifted and a genuine mensch. To be clear, I make no complaints about her, and neither Grant nor I criticize anything she does in this book. It is not her fault that Richard E. Grant has adored her since he wrote her a fan letter when he was 14. Not her fault that he commissioned a “two-foot-tall sculpture of Streisand’s face” for his garden. Not her fault that there are far too many pages about his adoration, his ruses to meet her and those meetings, in which — let me say again — she was the soul of grace.I could have done without all of that, because, like Richard E. Grant, I just wanted more of the feisty, unvarnished, irritable, generous, wise, unimpressed Joan Washington. You cannot read this book and not miss her very much.Amy Bloom’s most recent books are “Flower Girl” and “In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss.”A POCKETFUL OF HAPPINESS | By Richard E. Grant | 336 pp. | Simon & Schuster | $28.99 More

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      Angus Cloud, Actor on ‘Euphoria,’ Dies at 25

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      The cause of death was not released, but his family said that he had “intensely struggled” after the recent death of his father.Angus Cloud, the actor best known for portraying Fezco, a lovable drug dealer on the HBO television show “Euphoria,” died on Monday at his family home in Oakland, Calif. He was 25.The death was confirmed by Cait Bailey, Mr. Cloud’s representative, who shared a statement from his family. The statement did not specify a cause, but said that Mr. Cloud had “intensely struggled” after the recent death of his father, Conor Hickey, whom the family buried last week.“The only comfort we have is knowing Angus is now reunited with his dad, who was his best friend,” the family said. “Angus was open about his battle with mental health and we hope that his passing can be a reminder to others that they are not alone and should not fight this on their own in silence.”We are incredibly saddened to learn of the passing of Angus Cloud. He was immensely talented and a beloved part of the HBO and Euphoria family. We extend our deepest condolences to his friends and family during this difficult time. pic.twitter.com/G92zRWkbfH— HBO (@HBO) July 31, 2023
      Mr. Cloud was born on July 10, 1998, in Oakland and attended the Oakland School for the Arts, according to a 2019 profile in The Wall Street Journal. He built sets and worked on lighting and sound for his high school’s theater department, according to the profile. But before his role on “Euphoria,” he had never performed.Mr. Cloud was discovered in 2018 by a casting agent who saw him walking along Mercer Street in Greenwich Village. Mr. Cloud was working as a waiter in Brooklyn at the time and thought that the approach was a scam, but a friend convinced him to follow through.“Before this, I didn’t have any desire to act,” he said in an interview with The New York Times last year. “I guess I was just at the right place at the right time.”On “Euphoria,” Mr. Cloud quickly became a fan favorite, convincing the show’s creator to keep his character alive beyond his planned death in Season 1, according to a casting agent. Mr. Cloud continued playing Fezco through Season 2.Survivors include his mother, Lisa Cloud Hickey and his two sisters, Molly Hickey and Fiona Hickey. More

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      To Keep TV Shows Afloat, Some Networks Are Cutting Actors’ Pay

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      In a shrinking business, actors on some shows are being guaranteed less money, an issue that’s helping to fuel the Hollywood strike.Starring on the CBS sitcom “Bob Hearts Abishola” has been good for Bayo Akinfemi. Being a regular cast member for four years has given him financial security and made him a star in his native Nigeria, where the show is wildly popular. It even helped him branch out from acting, when producers gave him the opportunity to direct an episode.But Mr. Akinfemi and 10 of his castmates were told this year that the only way the half-hour show was going to get a fifth season was if budgets were cut. How the actors were paid was going to change.No longer would they be guaranteed pay for all 22 episodes of a season. Instead, Mr. Akinfemi and his castmates would be reclassified as recurring cast members. They would be paid the same amount per episode, but unlike regular cast members, they would be paid only for the episodes in which they appeared and would be guaranteed only five of those in a truncated 13-episode season, once the actors’ strike was over and performers returned to work. (Only Billy Gardell, who plays the white middle-aged businessman Bob, and Folake Olowofoyeku, who plays Abishola, the Nigerian nurse he loves, will remain series regulars.)“It was a bit surprising, for all of 10 seconds,” Mr. Akinfemi said in an interview before SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, went on strike. “We are disappointed, but we also understand at the end of the day it’s a business.”For decades, actors playing supporting characters on successful network television shows have been able to renegotiate their contracts in later seasons and reap financial windfalls. But this is a new era for network TV.It’s a business that has been struggling with depressed ratings, decreased advertising revenue and fierce competition from streaming services, resulting in millions of viewers cutting their cable subscriptions. And one way networks and production companies are trying to deal with the changing economics is to ask the casts of some long-running shows to take pay cuts.“Bob Hearts Abishola” was not the only show facing budget cuts, Channing Dungey, the chairwoman and chief executive of Warner Bros. Television Studios, said. David Livingston/Getty Images“The glory days of linear television are sadly behind us,” said Channing Dungey, the chairwoman and chief executive of Warner Bros. Television Studios, the studio behind “Bob Hearts Abishola.”This new reality in network television is one of the reasons behind the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes. Those on strike say the economics of the streaming era have effectively reduced their pay and cut into money they get from residuals, a type of royalty. The studios say they aren’t making the kind of money they used to, meaning that they’re having to shave costs wherever they can.The sides are at a standstill. The writers haven’t spoken to the studios since going out on strike on May 2, and the actors haven’t since walking out on July 14. No negotiations are scheduled.“Blue Bloods,” a CBS drama starring Tom Selleck, is returning for its 14th season only because the entire cast agreed to a 25 percent pay cut when the strike is over. On the CW network, “Superman & Lois,” which is entering its fourth season, and “All American: Homecoming,” which is hanging on for a third season, saw their budgets cut and cast members reduced to day players or eliminated.Not even the juggernaut represented by Dick Wolf’s lineup of shows on NBC is immune. A number of the actors on shows like “Chicago P.D.” and “Chicago Fire” are being guaranteed appearances in fewer episodes for the coming season, according to two people familiar with the productions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.“This is something that’s happening across the board,” Ms. Dungey said, adding that CBS wanted to renew “Bob Hearts Abishola” only if Warner Bros. was able to produce it for the network at a reduced cost. “There are a number of different shows, both on CBS and elsewhere, where the same kinds of considerations are coming into play.”CBS and NBC declined to comment.Word of the salary adjustments for “Bob Hearts Abishola” came out in late April, just days before SAG-AFTRA authorized its strike with a 97.9 percent vote in favor.“This is the beginning of the end for working-class actors,” the actress Ever Carradine, who has been in shows like “Commander in Chief” on ABC and Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” wrote on Twitter at the time. “I have never worked harder in my career to make less money, and I am not alone.”Today, first-time series regulars often earn anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 an episode, depending on the budget of the show, the size of the role, and the studio or network that’s footing the bill. Commissions for agents and management are subtracted from those sums.To some, the recent reductions are an inevitable correction from the era of peak television, when studios were eager to lure talent with lucrative contracts. Some executives argue that paring back salaries will ultimately allow more shows to be made, at a more reasonable price.Network shows do not draw anywhere close to the viewer numbers they did when 20 million people were watching “Seinfeld” and “Friends” every week in the 1990s.At the end of its fourth season, “Bob Hearts Abishola” was averaging 6.9 million viewers per episode, according to Nielsen’s Live +35 metric, which measures the first 35 days of viewing on both linear and digital platforms. Hits had bigger audiences, like CBS’s “Ghosts,” which averaged 11 million viewers over 35 days, and ABC’s “Abbott Elementary,” which averaged 9.1 million.But the rise of streaming has cannibalized network television on a scale the networks weren’t prepared for, and not even scaling back on scripted offerings has been enough to stem the bleeding. “Bob Hearts Abishola” is one of four prime-time scripted comedies left on CBS.“It is hard now to get shows to Seasons 5 and beyond, but it doesn’t mean that it can’t happen,” Ms. Dungey said. “It just is less likely to happen as often as it did in the past.”Yet the new reality means actors must decide whether to remain on a show at a reduced rate but with some job security or leave to see if they can find other jobs.The management team for Kelly Jenrette, an actress on the CW’s “All American: Homecoming,” told the trade publication Deadline that she had chosen to become a recurring character rather than “opt for a return as a series regular on reduced episodic guarantees.”Ms. Jenrette declined to be interviewed because, she said, she was told that doing so would violate the actors’ union’s ban on promoting projects associated with struck companies. The CW declined to comment.For some, the pride they take in their shows is also an enticement to stay. On “Bob Hearts Abishola,” Mr. Akinfemi plays Goodwin, an employee of Bob’s compression sock company who was on his way to becoming an economics professor in Nigeria before he left the country.Fans have stopped him in the Nigerian airport, in the streets of Toronto, even at the CVS near his home in Los Angeles to marvel that whole scenes of the show are spoken in Mr. Akinfemi’s native Yoruba tongue. (He also serves as the language consultant for the sitcom.)“The idea that there could be a show like this that really showcases Nigerian culture, it’s just unfathomable,” Mr. Akinfemi said. “That we are really representing Nigerian culture as accurately as possible and in a positive light, on American television, is mind-blowing to a lot of Nigerians and Africans.”He and the 10 other cast members affected by the pay changes on “Bob Hearts Abishola” all chose to stay.“These actors are attached to good, important, groundbreaking work,” said Tash Moseley, Mr. Akinfemi’s manager. “I think they knew that the actors would come back and do it no matter what.” More