A SAG Strike? But I Just Graduated From Acting School!

In May, Ishika Muchhal graduated with a bachelor of fine arts in acting from CalArts, a top acting school that boasts actors like Don Cheadle among its alumni.

She performed the classic Shakespeare and Chekhov plays on campus. She did on-camera training in her third and fourth year.

And two months after she graduated, the industry she hoped to enter shut down, as negotiations between studio producers and SAG-AFTRA came to a halt. The Writers Guild of America has been on strike since May.

“It's scary,” said Muchhal, who lives in Burbank.

Hers is one of more than 1,700 acting degrees awarded each year across the country, according to one count. Southern California is home to many well-respected acting programs.

These recent grads temper the fear and uncertainty of the strike with optimism that what results from the strike will lead to better working conditions for them and other actors.

A bright future

Muchhal is South Asian and wants to work in projects that bring those kinds of roles and stories to the forefront of Hollywood.

“It's scary for everyone. It's scary for the people who are striking right now, because they're not able to make money,” she said.

Muchhal counts herself as one of the lucky ones. She was able to hire an agent before the strike, and that agent has been able to get her work that doesn’t violate the strike.

Even as she’s apprehensive of how the strike will affect this part of her career, she supports SAG’s demands to improve compensation and conditions for actors. And that’s a feeling shared by other recent acting grads.

“There's such a bright future waiting for us if we can get through this and change the industry in the way that it really, frankly, needs to be changed,” said Zack Rocklin-Waltch, who graduated in May with a bachelor’s of fine arts in acting from USC.

Most new graduates won't be able to join SAG-AFTRA until after the strike; eligibility comes through working on projects covered by the guild, or through a year of work in an affiliated union.

“For however many months the strike is going to last, it's going to be really, really difficult, and that sucks,” he said. Unlike Muchhal, Rocklin-Waltch does not have an agent, and he says the strike’s made it even more difficult to get one.

Auditioning for an agent who can seek acting or other work that capitalizes on a budding actor’s skills is typically a first step as an acting student nears graduation.

“[The strike] does add a little bit to my anxiety,” said Christopher Amador, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in theater arts from Cal State Long Beach.

“I was always a little anxious, a little nervous going up to graduation because I know that this industry is a hard one to get into, hard to find an agent, hard to find auditions, hard even just to get a role somewhere,” he said.

Being prepared for the moment

As working actors prepared for the strike by looking at their finances and lining up non-union work, some of the acting students’ instructors did what they could this spring to talk to their students about ways to weather a possible strike.

“[In March] we usually get them all prepped,” said USC acting professor Kate Burton, who has decades of television and film experience.

“We're helping them with auditions, and we're helping them get their headshots and resumés together and helping them find representation … I was sort of halfway through that process … and [said] ‘Wait a minute, we've got to talk to them about a potential strike,’” she said.

So she talked to them about what a strike means and what to do during the strike, she said, and underlined that in any other year it would take recent acting graduates a year to get their feet wet and figure out the acting landscape.

“Guess what, this is a pretty wacky landscape, but this is the landscape right now,” Burton said she told students.

This spring’s acting graduates, like all the other college graduates, had to navigate large-scale shutdowns brought on by COVID-19 three years ago.

Zack Rocklin-Waltch graduated from USC just before the actor and writer strike. He and his friends have started an acting group to support one another through the strike.

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Zaydee Sanchez

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LAist

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“It feels like that kind of just complete shutdown, prepared me at least emotionally for something like this,” Rocklin-Waltch said.

“Things will resolve in their time and I'll do what I can do and I'll focus on what I can control,” he said.

For the time being, what he can control in his acting career is independent work with other actors. To that end, he’s founded a theater group called Eight Ball Theater. The company is producing a play he wrote called Fire at the Edge of the Earth.

“It's a queer love story set against the backdrop of Greek mythology and uses Greek mythological allegory to examine what it feels like to be a queer person falling in love in a heteronormative society,” he said.

The students’ DIY attitude has garnered the admiration of their instructors.

“They have a strong backbone… they're going to need a strong backbone to get through this next phase,” Burton said.

Things actors can do that don’t violate the strike

Actors can work on independent films and theater and do non-Hollywood voice-over work, such as audio books.

Amador has spent over $1,000 to outfit a room in the house he rents in Compton so he can record voice-overs.

“I was sort of preparing while I was in school, getting soundproofing, microphones, figuring out how to do everything on my computer,” he said.

At his home in Compton, Christopher Amador, a recent college graduate from CSU Long Beach, says he is waiting out the writer and actor strike and hoping for the best.

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Zaydee Sanchez

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LAist

)

Amador auditioned for an agent who specializes in commercials, and is waiting to hear back.

But instructors warn that the uncertainty of the strike, especially if it lasts through the rest of the year, may do irreparable harm to the aspirations of recent acting graduates.

“They have no pension to fall back on, they have no real safety net. And their dreams are on the verge of being dashed,” said Oliver Mayer, a professor of theater at USC.

Mayer speaks from his experience of the 2007-2008 writers strike.

“I lost a movie that I was working on … probably the last movie I've been involved with since. I devoted myself to the theater in large part because I realized that was a place where I could still do my work,” he said.