Billy Porter and his husband Adam Smith recently announced that they are ending their marriage after six years, Media Take Out reported.
Now the actor is losing his home. And Billy claims that it’s because of the new Hollywood strike.
In a new interview with Evening Standard, Billy claims that he had to sell his house in the midst of the strikes in Hollywood in order to save money.
Billy, who won an Emmy for his work on FX’s “Pose,” said he’s having to take cost-saving measures in his real life as various projects he was set to work on in September have been tabled.
“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 [to work]. The life of an artist, until you make fµck-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.”
“In the late Fifties, early Sixties, when they structured a way for artists to be compensated properly through residual [payments], it allowed for the two percent of working actors — and there are 150,000 people in our union — who work consistently…Then streaming came in,” Porter said. “There’s no contract for it…And they don’t have to be transparent with the numbers — it’s not Nielsen ratings anymore. The streaming companies are notoriously opaque with their viewership figures. The business has evolved. So the contract has to evolve and change, period. To hear Bob Iger say that our demands for a living wage are unrealistic? While he makes $78,000 a day?”
“I don’t have any words for it, but: fµck you,” Porter added 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 England]. But when I go back I will join the picket lines.”
[social_warfare]