https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-shaming-of-geoffrey-owens-and-the-inability-to-see-actors-as-laborers-too
om Alamy
Not long ago, I was visiting the set of a popular TV show for a story and recognized an actor who was there shooting a guest spot. I remembered Geoffrey Owens not from “The Cosby Show,” on which he played Elvin Tibideaux for five seasons, but from my sophomore year at Yale, where he was teaching undergraduate acting. Owens, the son of the former U.S. congressman Major Owens, had himself graduated cum laude from Yale, in 1983, and has since taught at Primary Stages and Columbia University. He’s also been on Broadway—most recently in 2013, in “Romeo and Juliet”—and on prestige TV shows such as “The Affair.”
In other words, Owens is what we think of as a successful working actor: known but not a “celebrity,” with an IMDb page that rarely skips a year. Apparently, that’s why a woman shopping at Trader Joe’s last week, in Clifton, New Jersey, was so jarred to see Owens bagging groceries that she snapped his photo and sent it to the Daily Mail, which ran the headline, “From learning lines to serving the long line!” Fox News picked up the story, and on Saturday a Twitter storm erupted—most of it shaming Fox News for shaming Owens for working for a living. “So, 26 years after one TV job, this guy looks differently (shock) and is earning an honest living at a Trader Joe’s. The people taking his picture and passing judgment are trash,” the actor Justine Bateman tweeted. The editor Max Weiss wrote, “RT if you think Geoffrey Owens took a much more honorable path in his life than Bill Cosby.” Even Dana Loesch, the N.R.A. spokeswoman, weighed in: “I hate stories like this. He’s a man working hard, there’s shame in publishing this story but not in this man’s job.”
As egregious as the story was, it was a fitting subject going into Labor Day weekend. We don’t tend to think of actors as laborers, despite the robust unions that represent them—Actors’ Equity and sag-aftra. The most visible actors serve as aspirational figures, celebrated (or vilified) for their glamour and luxury. When we do hear about salaries, even in the context of gender discrimination, it’s often in the million-dollar range. As plenty of people pointed out on social media, conservative outlets like Fox paint Hollywood actors as coastal élites, out of touch with working Americans, only to turn around and “expose” one of them for earning a paycheck. There was, of course, a racial element as well, which the writer Mark Harris described as a subtext that begins “See? Even when you give them every opportunity, they still end up. . . .” One wonders if Owens would have drawn any attention if he’d been spotted working as a coal miner or some other “salt-of-the-earth” job thought of as honorable and manly, rather than in a “softer” form of labor that is itself suffering from what The Atlantic called “The Silent Crisis of Retail Employment.”
Actors have long been part of the gig economy. Roles and benefits come and go unpredictably. Side jobs with flexible hours are a fact of life. The performers I know have been office managers, S.A.T. tutors, dog-walkers, P.R .assistants, financial advisers, and, of course, waiters. One actor friend is learning calligraphy so she can start her own business. A comedian I know used to wait tables at a restaurant uptown, but she wouldn’t tell her friends which one it was, for fear of being caught in the act of working. Even when roles do come along, they can be a financial strain. One friend of mine was recently in a sold-out Off Broadway show that was critically acclaimed and extended twice, for which she earned a starting salary of five hundred and six dollars a week. Most non-performers think of the struggling-actor life as a temporary pit stop on the road to fame and fortune, but name recognition isn’t a retirement plan. It’s worth pointing out, too, that Owens is also a victim of Bill Cosby, with residual checks presumably drying up now that broadcasters are pulling “The Cosby Show” from syndication.
= new reply since forum marked as read