A number of Hollywood actors have paid tribute to the striking writers in their acceptance speeches at the MTV Movie & TV Awards on Sunday.
This year’s awards show was pre-recorded after actress and talk show host Drew Barrymore pulled as host of the ceremony. It was done in solidarity with the ongoing writers’ strike. She did, however, appear in several pre-recorded sketches. She parodied movies like Barbie and Cocaine Bear, and received the the Best Host Award for the Drew Barrymore Show.
This is the first major writers’ strike in 15 years. Writers call for better pay and working conditions in the streaming era.
Actress Jennifer Coolidge says they are “fighting for the rights of artists everywhere”. She received the Comedic Genius Award.
While collecting the prize for best breakthrough performance, British actor James Quinn – who plays Eddy Munson in Stranger Things – also paid tribute saying “Being a writer is a hard job, [and] It deserves respect.”
The Last of Us star Pedro Pascal also acknowledged writers and those fighting very hard for fair wages.
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The Writers Guild of America (WGA) planned to picket the event in Santa Monica, California before MTV announced that the live show was scrapped.
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The Writers Guild of America strike
More than 11, 000 writers from the WGA downed their tools last week after talks with major studios broke down.
Unions are seeking higher minimum wage and additional writers per show. They also demand a greater share for royalties of shows that appear for longer on streaming platforms.
Late-night talk shows were the first to “go dark” without their writers with picket lines forming outside the studios and offices of popular entities like Netflix and Paramount.
