Ah yes, back to helping yet other SAG-AFTRA members who are one medical premium away from being eligible for health care, Jimmy Kimmel. A current casting for a role in the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” wants actors who are 1401 dollars short for the union’s health plan minimum wage. It is a program that seeks to ensure that those low performing or out of work actors can get the necessary healthcare benefits especially during difficult periods.
In 2023, SAG-AFTRA demanded that the actors had to accrue not less than $26,470 from acting assignments to be able to enroll in a health plan, and this scale rises by two percent per year. This comes at a time when many of the players are still digging from the impact of last year’s historic SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild of America strikes that severely disabled production. Still, the registering of new contracts could not turn the industry around to some extent; most actors continue to lack adequate employment opportunities to generate the set earnings.
This is not the first time that Kimmel is coming to the defense of the acting fraternity. In an episode she hosted for the Jimmy Kimmel show back in the show’s freshman year, Hollywood celebrities were given lines just to get the health benefits of being an actor. This constant insistence underlines the fact that more support from the industry is still required regularly, especially in such conditions, with the economic crises and, sometimes, the conflict of the workers.