Susan Sarandon

Susan Sarandon (b. 1946, New York City) won the Best Actress Oscar for Dead Man Walking after decades of defining roles — Thelma & Louise, Bull Durham, The Rocky Horror Picture Show — and an activist career as long as her filmography, from anti-war protest to labor picket lines.

The picket line against perpetual replicas

When SAG-AFTRA struck in July 2023, Sarandon was on the New York picket lines from day one, telling The Hollywood Reporter outside Netflix that if actors did not deal with streaming and AI immediately there would be “no turning back.” The union’s AI fight centered on studio proposals to scan performers and reuse their digital likenesses — background actors first — without meaningful consent or recurring pay.

In an October 2023 THR interview she laid out the stakes as she saw them: AI frightened her precisely because it could take an actor’s image and reuse it forever, in any film, with the performer stripped of control — “this is a now or never situation,” she said, predicting fewer and fewer rights for artists as time passed. She even mused whether actors would need to “copyright our voices or ourselves.”

Sarandon’s AI position is of a piece with her larger labor politics — she framed the strike as workers versus consolidating corporate power, not artists versus computers. The contract SAG-AFTRA won that November established consent and compensation rules for digital replicas, a partial answer to exactly the scenario she warned about.