Abbott Elementary’s Lisa Ann Walter on Supporting the SAG-AFTRA Strike After Seeing Contracts ‘Devolving’ Throughout Her Career

As the daughter of a public school teacher, Lisa Ann Walter championed teachers throughout her life. From her show Abbott Elementary to her recent partnership with BIC’s back-to-school supply closet, Walter made sure to stand by teachers and shed light on the behind-the-scenes struggles of the career. As an actress, she’s doing the exact same. In fact, in addition to fully supporting the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, she hasn’t been afraid to speak out about their importance either.

Most recently, the Parent Trap star opened up to SheKnows about the importance of the SAG-AFTRA strike, which has been ongoing since July 13. “Well, first of all, full disclosure, I’m quite involved in union activity,” she tells SheKnows. “I’ve been a board member, local and national board member for eight years.”

“The reason that I got involved as many years ago as I did was because I saw the way our contracts were devolving,” she continues. “Actors that you see on TV, just because you’ve seen them on TV or in a movie, it doesn’t mean they’re rich. It doesn’t even mean they’re middle class, it could mean that they barely made enough money to pay their rent for six months after you pay your reps and you pay taxes.”

“People would be stunned,” she says, adding that, on average, “streaming is 25% of what we used to earn on a regular TV show.”

“And that’s happened with each new technology,” she adds. “When VHS went to DVD, they cut the formula saying, ‘Well, we don’t know if anybody’s gonna buy these things.’ But of course, they know,” she says. “They know because they’ve already planned that everything is gonna go into DVD, and then Blu-ray, and now cable, and then streaming.”

“And with each new technology, they ask the performing side, and writers as well, to take a cut because ‘We don’t know if this thing’s gonna work’ but they know,” she continues. “They know and they throw tons of money into it and they are counting on people now with streaming to support it via subscriptions but they didn’t factor in as part of their cost model actually paying the people who make the content.”

Instead, actors and writers continued working for less and less money. Per Walter, studios would then use the contract as an excuse to not make changes. “We’ll talk about it on the next contract,” studio execs would say. “Except that never happened,” she continues. “That never came. They never cut us in, and we cannot survive on less money.”

Walter adds that the current contract also favors the studios as they end up making “more profit and more profit.” The actress then spoke about Miramax, a production company under Paramount which she worked with in the 2003 movie Shall We Dance? starring Jennifer Lopez, Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon. “They were incredibly creative, wonderful film company [that] never showed a profit on a movie,” Walter says, listing a few of their box office hits like Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction.

Using that as the prime example, Walter calls out the studio’s bluff that they don’t have enough money to give writers and actors what they’re due. “We’ve done the math,” she says. “It would cause 0.026% percentage of their revenue to cover all of the asks for the writers and actors to just live.”

As a regular on a hit show, which was recently nominated for a whopping eight Emmy Awards nominations, Walter also acknowledges that all the changes the strikes are asking might not even impact her that much. “This is for the people that can’t negotiate a contract, for the background artists, the basic wage earner in stunts, in dance, in acting and all of it,” she adds. “It’s for them.”

Speaking of her show, Walter hasn’t been the only Abbott star to speak out in support of the strikes. In fact, the whole cast has come together to show their support. “Sheryl [Lee Ralph] and I are quite supportive of our union siblings,” she says of the co-star-turned-bestie. “I had been out there on the line when it was WGA that went out along with my castmates and we had a great day on the Philly line.”

“I always bring [William Stanford] Davis with me, who plays Mr. Johnson,” she adds. “I always swing by his house and he gets in the car.” Talk about friendship goals!

Walter concludes, “I just hope that whatever the roadblocks are, we can figure that out, get that out of the way and all of us go back to doing what we love, which is to entertain the whole world. I hope we do it really soon.” We hope so too!

Before you go, click here to see all the celebrities who supported the SAG-AFTRA & WGA strikes.