Marvel Star Reveals Studio Sent Her an Insulting $0.14 Check for the Show with 87% Score
Amid the double strike, Marvel’s TV show star revealed that the residual checks she and her colleagues are receiving lately are downright humiliating: 14 cents, that’s it!
The double strike of the Writer’s and the Actor’s Guilds of America is still going strong as tens of thousands of industry professionals are expressing their frustration over the working conditions, unfair payments, and the threat of AI that’s looming over them as well as many other workers throughout numerous industries.
Both writers and actors demand the same things: they want to be treated decently, they want to be able to feed their families, and they want their jobs to be protected. Pretty much what everyone else wants, really, save for the fact that the movie industry is way more radicalized in terms of the gap between the rich and the poor.
It’s especially noticeable when you take a look at the actors. While the top dogs receive tens of millions of dollars for their movies, young and aspiring actors barely have anything to put on the table, and their working conditions are horrible. The small actors are completely dependent on the will of the producers at all times.
Even if a smaller actor gets a role, this doesn’t mean they’ll get paid. When you’re not a top dog, you can star in a show and be left with barely enough to make it through the week — and later on, when the time for your residual check will come, you’ll get a fair dose of humiliation coupled with a couple of bucks at best.
As Noëlle Renée Bercy, the star of Marvel’s TV show Cloak and Dagger and one of the striking actors, revealed, her most recent residual check from Marvel/Disney was just 14 cents! Cloak and Dagger was canceled after two seasons in 2019 but it still holds a great critics score of 87% on Rotten Tomatoes. Still, Bercy got nothing.
“AI isn’t the only problem; it’s greed. Human greed is the problem,” Noëlle shared.
Truly, if even working for giants like Marvel can’t guarantee you’ll have food on the table, it’s hard to imagine what’s going on with the smaller actors that didn’t even get to work on the big studios’ projects. Marvel pays its leading men millions even for complete failures like Secret Invasion, but a smaller actor from a critically acclaimed show gets $0.14.
Something is very wrong here, and the math just doesn’t work out.
Source: Rolling Stone