Gilmore Girls Star Blasts Disney CEO Amid Dual Strikes: ‘Maybe You Should Take a Look in the Mirror’
Longtime Gilmore Girls second banana Sean Gunn is taking center stage on the SAG-AFTRA picket lines with his fiery rhetoric directed at Hollywood’s aristocracy.
On Friday, the actor behind Stars Hollow’s ever-eccentric Kirk Gleason took aim at his quasi-Guardians of the Galaxy boss, Disney CEO Bob Iger, in the wake of the exec saying striking actors and writers are not being “realistic” with their demands.
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“[Iger] needs to remember that in 1980, CEOs like him made 30 times what their lowest worker was making,” Gunn vented to an AP reporter (watch here). “Now Bob Iger makes 400 times what his lowest worker [earns]. And I think that’s a shame.”
Speaking to Iger directly, Gunn continued, “Maybe you should take a look in the mirror and ask yourself, ‘Why is that?’ And, ‘Is it OK? Is it morally OK. Is it ethically OK that you make that much more than your lowest worker?’ If your response is, ‘That’s just how business is done now,’ well that sucks and that makes you a s—ty person.”
Also on Friday, Gunn lashed out at Netflix — home to all seven seasons of Gilmore Girls as well as the 2016 revival Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.
“I wanted to come out and protest Netflix because I was on a television show called Gilmore Girls for a long time that has brought in massive profits for Netflix,” Gunn told The Hollywood Reporter. “It has been one of their most popular shows for a very long time, over a decade. It gets streamed over and over and over again, and I see almost none of the revenue that comes into that.”
A day later, Gunn — who says he received pushback for not specifying that “my residuals aren’t paid by Netflix, but… by Warner Bros” — clarified his comments in a Twitter video.
“OK, first of all, I never used the word ‘residuals’ in my interview, but that’s not the important thing,” Gunn explained. “The important thing is that the whole point of my interview is that Netflix doesn’t pay residuals to the actors, so there’s no sharing in the success of a show with Netflix. It’s true that they pay a licensing fee to Warner Bros. and that Warner Bros. then pays residuals from that licensing fee, which is a very small amount, particularly for a show that’s been off the air for a long time. But when the show is a huge success, and they generate millions of dollars in profits for Netflix, we don’t share in any of that, in large part because there’s no transparency with their numbers.
“Really, this is about fairness for everybody,” he concluded. “We just want to make sure we have a fair deal. If a show’s a success, we should participate in that. That seems totally reasonable.”
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