On Thursday, the Writers Guild of America got some new pals on the picket line: SAG-AFTRA, the union representing Hollywood’s actors, voted to go on strike. It was one of the biggest days for labor in decades — the two guilds haven’t gone on strike together since 1960 (when the president of SAG-AFTRA was, of all people, Ronald Reagan) — and, of course, passions flared. Just ask Ron Perlman, who got a little worked-up even by his own admission.
Ron Perlman on the studio exec that wanted the strike to drag on until union members lose their homes:
“There’s a lot of ways to lose your house. You wish that on people, you wish that families starve while you’re making 27-fucking-million a year.” pic.twitter.com/BWBNeervml
— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) July 14, 2023
On Friday, the Hellboy star took to Instagram to post a since-deleted video in which he went scorched earth on the studio execs who told Deadline that they were going to “allow things to drag on” until writers (and, now, actors) start “losing their apartments and losing their homes,” which one said was “cruel but necessary.” Perlman, like many, was incensed by those sentiments. But Perlman went farther than most.
“Listen to me, mother*cker. There are a lot of ways to lose your house,” he raged. “Some of it is just figuring who fucking said that…and where he fucking lives.” He added, “Be careful, motherf*cker.”
Later that day, a much calmed-down Perlman posted another video, which wasn’t exactly an apology but did acknowledge that he may have gone too far — while clarifying that he stood by the foundational ideas that got him so worked-up.
“Admittedly I got a bit heated,” Perlman said in the second video. “The asshole who made that comment doesn’t wish anybody any harm.”
But Perlman was still livid about execs saying, in his words, that they weren’t “even going to bargain with these f*cking kids until they start f*cking bleeding and their families start bleeding.”
He called the two strikes a “symptom of a struggle that’s way bigger than the strike itself…a symptom of the soullessness of corporate America and how everything has become corporatized in this country.”
Perlman talked about the strange, Faustian bargain that’s always permeated in Hollywood, in which artists team up with wealthy magnates, who fund their movies and TV shows — and who then get product (for lack of a better word) in exchange.
He also got a bit mushy about the industry in which he’s long worked. “I don’t know where I’d be without movies,” he said, saying they’ve taught him about “the human experience, told in all of its glory, with music and sound and fury.” Execs, he admitted, “enabled all those beautiful experiences”:
“I have nothing but love for the guys who started the studios, but let’s maintain a degree of humanity in all of this. Okay? It can’t all be about your f*cking Porsche. And your f*cking stock prices. There has got to be dignity if we are going to hold the mirror up and reflect the human experience. “
Perlman is no stranger to using social media to unload on powerful people. He has no beef with telling Ted Cruz to “go f*ck yourself” or with calling Ron DeSantis a “f*cking Nazi pig.”
(Via The AV Club)