Emily Blunt, Matt Damon clicked on the premiere of Oppenheimer. (Image courtesy: AFP)

New Delhi:

In solidarity with the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Radio and Television Artists (SAG-AFTRA), the celebrities of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (Robert Downey Jr, Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt and Matt Damon) walked out of the movie’s London premiere. Hollywood went on a strike after movie and film studios didn’t acknowledge the calls for for higher pay and extra safety in opposition to synthetic intelligence within the trade. Earlier on the crimson carpet, Matt Damon had instructed Variety, “We talked about it. Look, if it’s called now, everyone’s going to walk obviously in solidarity… Once the strike is officially called. That’s why we moved this (red carpet) up because we know the second it’s called, we’re going home.”

Matt Damon extending his help to the SAG-AFTRA, added that “we’ve got to get a fair deal.” “We gave the strike authorization. We voted 98% to 2% to do that because we know our leadership has our best interest at heart It’s really about working actors. It’s $26,000 to qualify for health coverage and a lot of people are on the margins and residual payments are getting them across that threshold. This isn’t an academic exercise. This is real life and death stuff. Hopefully we get to a resolution quickly. No one wants a work stoppage, but we’ve got to get a fair deal.” Variety quoted the actor as saying.

Meanwhile, Matt Damon’s Oppenheimer co-star Emily Blunt instructed Variety: “Obviously we stand with all of the actors and at whatever point it’s called, we’re going to be going home and standing together through it because I want everyone to get a fair deal.” When requested if she will likely be becoming a member of the picket line herself, The Devil Wears Prada actor added, “Oh, I think so.”

Veteran actor-filmmaker Kenneth Branagh, talking of the strike, instructed Variety, “There are a lot of people here we did not want to disappoint, but we’re also in complete solidarity with our colleagues and what they’re doing. I know they’ve worked diligently to achieve an agreement which is happening at a critical point in our industry. It’s important that we’re ready to be shoulder-to-shoulder with them as the situation develops.”

The preliminary strike deadline was postponed by a month and it started on Thursday after studios failed to satisfy the calls for. Hollywood actor union president Fran Drescher instructed information company AFP, “We, in good faith, gave them an extension, with the hope that they would make deep inroads, and we would really have something to discuss. But we were duped. They stayed behind closed doors, they kept canceling our meetings, wasting time.”

(With inputs from AFP)