The power of the Christian faith on American soil should never be underestimated. In Hollywood, a strike by actors has broken out that plans to paralyze the audiovisual industry with the aim of standing up to power: they want to say enough in the face of the precariousness of their trade. But, for now, there is a series that has been exonerated from having to stop filming indefinitely: The Chosen, a television adaptation of the life of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
The news was made public from the Twitter account of the series. “Good news! We have just been told from SAG that an exemption has been approved for us. We will continue shooting on Monday,” they reported. While the productions have the right to ask the US actors’ union, the Screen Actors Guild, for the possibility of keeping the production active, The Chosen is the first series to receive approval since it declared a strike on Friday the 14th of July.
The creator Dallas Jenkins had also made his request publicly: “We have filed all the necessary paperwork immediately. We qualify all the conditions for a waiver. Every day that goes by without a response costs us hundreds of thousands of dollars while our actors are standing in Utah. We’re the good guys. We’ve treated your actors well.”
The reason why The Chosen could ask to work normally has to do with the related companies. It is produced by Angel Studios, which is not part of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Produces (AMPTP), the bosses against whom Hollywood actors protest.
Angel Studios, in fact, has become especially known these weeks for the success of the movie Sound of Freedom in theaters, being an unexpected success for its way of attracting the evangelical right to theaters with 85 million raised from a budget of 14.5 million. It has also received criticism for, with Jim Caviezel leading the project, fueling Q-Anon conspiracy theories around international pedophile networks.
As portals such as Deadline highlight, the limits that allow a production to obtain the exemption or not are not clear. The Chosen, which is filming its fourth season, may be independently financed but has previously had distribution deals with Lionsgate, The CW channel, Netflix, Amazon or Peacock, companies that are current enemies of the actors.
In the event of a new agreement being reached between the AMPTP and the SAG actors, Angel Studios undertakes to apply the new working conditions to its workers. So far, The Chosen, which features actor Jonathan Roumie in the skin of the son of María and José, has hardly had to alter its shooting schedule, so the production has not suffered from the movements in Hollywood.
As Fran Drescher, president of the actors’ union, reported, Hollywood studios “are on the wrong side of history” because of the way they make their profession more precarious. And on what fronts do you want labor improvements? They are angry that, with the advent of streaming, actors receive hardly any residual benefits from their presence in hit plays; they fear the arrival of artificial intelligence with a future that, if it depended on the studies, would be like in the Black Mirror episode with Salma Hayek; they want to combat casting calls with home videos that make life difficult for working actors; And, to top it off, the working conditions of the actors have worsened, as they are paid by filming sessions and not by episodes, which makes it difficult for those who jump from television project to television project to make ends meet or have health insurance.
