Ahsoka and Haunted Mansion Star Rosario Dawson Comments on SAG Strike

Rosario Dawson says "there's no money" for young actors working on streaming shows.

By Jamie Jirak

Last month, the negotiations between SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP officially broke down with no deal in place, which means most film and television productions have halted. Actors with upcoming projects are unable to promote their new work, but some big stars are speaking out about the current strike. This week, Haunted Mansion and Ahsoka star Rosario Dawson joined a group of volunteers for the Shiseido Blue Project beach clean-up at the 2023 US Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach, California. The actor spoke with ABC News about the environmental clean-up and also addressed the current strike.

"You know I think that when you hear the things that people are sharing and you know their experiences they've been having... I don't know that I actually would have continued being an actor. I started out really young and those residual checks that came in were small, but they were significant enough that I could have fresh food versus ramen," Dawson explained. "That was a very real thing and now you have these huge, successful shows on these streaming platforms and young actors coming up and there's no money for them."

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"I think it's [a] beautiful kind of reckoning of humanity, and that's why I feel like it scales in the same way we're talking about climate change," Dawson continued. "There's just like a lot of confluences coming together of people realizing we've just gone into hyperdrive for so long and all our toys and gadgets and things, acceleration of these past decades, as someone who straddles the centuries ... it's incredible what I've seen in my lifetime. But I think we need to take a second, and that's what's happening with workers across every industry, to go, 'What does the future look like?' If we don't figure that out now it's going to be very dire for our children."

What Is Ahsoka About?

Fan-favorite Star Wars hero Ahsoka Tano returns in the brand new series on Disney+. Rosario Dawson stars in Star Wars: Ahsoka, premiering in August on the streamer. The series picks up after the events of The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, in which we saw the former Jedi searching for Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen) and helping Luke Skywalker train Grogu. Ahsoka will be joined on her new mission alongside longtime allies Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) and Hera Syndulla (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) as they attempt to track down Thrawn, who was last seen disappearing to the far reaches of space after a confrontation with Ezra Bridger (Eman Esfandi). Star Wars: Ahsoka is the latest live-action series from Lucasfilm's creative duo of Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni.

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