Netflix's Atypical lead has eight days to earn $4,000 or lose health insurance — so who is Jack Haven, and how did an A24 star fall short?
An actor with a four-season Netflix series, an A24 lead and nine award nominations sat down in front of a phone last weekend and offered to take almost any job on almost any set. Not a stunt, not a bit. A deadline in the SAG-AFTRA rulebook closes on 30 September, and they are about $4,000 short of it.
You have almost certainly watched them without catching the name. Jack Haven played Casey Gardner across four seasons of Netflix’s Atypical and Maddy in A24’s I Saw the TV Glow. On 20 September they sat down in front of a phone camera, said they were in a bit of an emergency situation and needed $4,000 before the month was out. Then came the pitch.
Hire me on a set, on a production, and I will do pretty much any job. I can sing, I can dance, I can talk softly, loudly, I can do accents — British.
There is an email address at the end for offers. Gay Times picked the clip up the next day, Them ran it on Monday, and that is when the American internet found it.
Which is where the double-take comes in, because that is a working résumé. I Saw the TV Glow was last year’s cult object and brought in most of the nine award nominations IMDb lists on their page. Before it came Bill & Ted Face the Music, opposite Keanu Reeves; after it, this year’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Haven is 32, and if the name still does not land, that is because the credits up to last year read Brigette Lundy-Paine.
What the $4,000 is actually for
It is not rent. It is the gap to a number in the SAG-AFTRA Health Plan rulebook, and the deadline falls at the end of this month rather than the end of the year because the Plan does not count a calendar year. It counts a four-quarter Base Earnings Period, and the one closing on 30 September decides coverage for all of 2027. Book a job on 2 October and the money lands in the next bucket. That is the whole race.
- 2026 benefit year — $28,090 in covered earnings
- 2027 — $28,933
- 2028 — $29,801
- 2029 — $30,695
- 2030 — $31,616
The Board of Trustees raised those figures on 27 August. Take $4,000 off the 2027 line and Haven is sitting somewhere near $24,900 for the year.
There is a back door. A performer can also qualify on 108 Eligibility Days — sessional earnings divided by the union minimum daily rate — and the Trustees left that at 108 when they moved everything else. Haven has not said which of the two calculations they are short on.
And if the money does not arrive
Clearing the line is not the end of it either. From 1 January the quarterly premium runs $390 for a performer alone, $549 with one dependent, $780 with two or more. Qualify, and you then pay $1,560 a year for the privilege.
Miss it and there is still Extended Career COBRA, which keeps coverage running at a reduced rate for 12 or 18 months if you have the credits and cleared $22,300. On the arithmetic above, Haven clears that one with room to spare.
Neither the union nor the Plan has said anything, and the Plan does not discuss individual participants. Haven can see their own running total in the members’ portal, which is presumably where the $4,000 came from. Eight days left, then — and here is the part that explains the shape of the request: under a union agreement a day of background work counts toward the total exactly as a lead does. Hence an appeal addressed to anybody hiring, rather than a quiet call to a casting director.
