Billy Porter Says He’s Been Forced To Sell House Due To Strikes

deadline.com:

Add Billy Porter to the list of thousands financially affected by the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, following the revelation that the actor will have to sell his house, at an extremely precarious moment for entertainment workers. “I have to sell my house… Because we’re on strike.

And I don’t know when we’re gonna go back [to work],” said Porter in an interview with Evening Standard, in support of his music career. “The life of an artist, until you make f**k-you money — which I haven’t made yet — is still cheque-to-cheque.

I was supposed to be in a new movie and on a new television show starting in September. None of that is happening.” Continued Porter, with reference to a July Deadline article quoting an anonymous exec on the WGA strike, “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.” The actor’s comments come just under 100 days into the writers guild’s strike against studios and streamers, which wouldn’t agree to the terms of the new film and TV contract it has been pursuing.

The thesps are themselves 26 days into their own labor dispute. Porter highlighted his personal situation in part to dispute a notion of the actors strike among “some lay people” — that it’s simply about “a bunch of millionaires trying to get more millions,” rather than about cementing the financial security of the many in the working class.