Sean Gunn appeared in more than 130 episodes of Gilmore Girls, but according to him, the TV drama’s streaming popularity hasn’t made much of an impact on his finances.
Gunn played Kirk Gleason, a kooky Stars Hollow resident, across all seven seasons of Gilmore Girls, which aired on The WB and The CW between 2000 and 2007. He returned to the part for the 2016 Netflix continuation, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.
And in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter from the front lines of the SAG-AFTRA strike on Friday, January 14, Gunn said that the Gilmore Girls residuals he gets from Warner Bros. Discovery don’t reflect the show’s successful afterlife on Netflix.
Warner Bros./Courtesy: Everett Collection
“I was on a television show called Gilmore Girls for a long time that has brought in massive profits for Netflix,” he told THR as he joined other SAG-AFTRA members picketing the AMPTP. “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.”
Gunn added: “You really need to rethink how you do business and share the wealth with people. Otherwise, this is all going to come crashing down.”
As THR reports, residuals for actors like Gunn aren’t influenced by the number of people who watch their TV shows on streaming platforms.
The residuals issue is one of many points of contention that led to SAG-AFTRA’s strike. In a popular TikTok video from December 2020, Orange Is the New Black actor Kimiko Glenn showed a SAG-AFTRA foreign-royalty statement she’d received for residuals from the Netflix series. Her income on the statement totaled $27.30.
And Glenn, who played Brook Soso on the show, is one of several OITNB actors who spoke to The New Yorker recently about the compensation from the show.
“The first thing we say to each other when we see each other, is, like, ‘Yeah, it’s really f–ked up — all my residuals are gone!’” added Emma Myles, who played Leanne Taylor on the show. “When you’re a kid, you have this idea: once I’m on something that people actually see, I’ll be rich, and I’ll have a house that has a bathtub. And you look around after being on a hit show, and you’re, like, Wow, I’m still in the same one-bedroom apartment. Was this how it was supposed to be?”
SAG-AFTRA, an actors union with around 160,000 members, launched a strike on Friday against AMPTP, which represents Hollywood studios, networks, and streaming platforms. Other issues in the walkout include the use of AI in film and TV productions and the practice of self-tape auditions.