Bryan Cranston, Jessica Chastain Join Star-Studded Times Square Rally of Striking Actors and Writers 

Actor Bryan Cranston speaks during a SAG-AFTRA during the "Rock The City For A Fair Contract" strike rally at Times Square on July 25, 2023 in New York City. (AFP)
Actor Bryan Cranston speaks during a SAG-AFTRA during the "Rock The City For A Fair Contract" strike rally at Times Square on July 25, 2023 in New York City. (AFP)
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Bryan Cranston, Jessica Chastain Join Star-Studded Times Square Rally of Striking Actors and Writers 

Actor Bryan Cranston speaks during a SAG-AFTRA during the "Rock The City For A Fair Contract" strike rally at Times Square on July 25, 2023 in New York City. (AFP)
Actor Bryan Cranston speaks during a SAG-AFTRA during the "Rock The City For A Fair Contract" strike rally at Times Square on July 25, 2023 in New York City. (AFP)

SAG-AFTRA held its largest and most star-studded rally yet Tuesday in Times Square in a picket sign-waving show of solidarity 12 days into the actors strike.

A day after a Variety report questioned the lack of A-listers that have hit picket lines thus far, the rally Tuesday boasted more star wattage than perhaps any single strike action yet. Among those joining throngs of demonstrators were Jessica Chastain, Bryan Cranston, Brendan Fraser, Ellen Burstyn, Wendell Pierce, Steve Buscemi, Rachel Zegler, Michael Shannon, Jane Curtin, Christian Slater and Chloe Grace Moretz.

Taking up a full city block, actors and representatives from the actors union took turns giving fiery speeches on a stage in the heart of Times Square while tourists gawked and passing trucks honked in support. At times, the actors took aim at the corporate lights and billboards around them, including the Walt Disney-owned ESPN and ABC studios that sat alongside the rally.

“We’ve got a message to Mr. Iger,” said Cranston, directing his comments at Disney CEO Bob Iger. “I know, sir, that you look through things from a different lens. We don’t expect you to understand who we are but we ask you to hear us, and beyond that, to listen to us when we tell you we will not be having our jobs taken away and given to robots. We will not have you take away our right to work and earn a decent living.”

The rally took place a stone’s throw from Broadway theaters and, given the talent involved, featured a higher degree of show business than your usual labor rally. “Avatar” actor Stephen Lang quoted Frederick Douglass. Wendell Pierce recited Samuel Beckett. Tituss Burgess didn’t speak; he sang Stephen Sondheim.

Arian Moayed, who played the investor Stewy Hosseini in “Succession,” compared the characters of the HBO series to the studio executives the actors are negotiating with.

“It’s like these people haven’t seen (expletive) ‘Succession,’” Moayed exclaimed. “It’s about you!”

Christine Baranski of “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight” likewise drew from her own credits.

“We will not live under corporate feudalism. It is time, it is just simply time to make things right. Our contribution will not be undervalued, and we will not be robbed,” said Baranski before concluding: “Let’s fight the good fight!”

Earlier this month, actors joined striking screenwriters who walked out in May. It’s the first time both unions have been on strike at the same time since 1960. The stoppage has shuttered nearly all film and television production. Actors say the streaming revolution has altered pay in entertainment, stripping them of residuals and remaking working conditions. They are also seeking guardrails against the use of artificial intelligence, along with increases to the union’s health care and pension programs.

“Our industry has changed exponentially,” said Cranston. “We are not in the same business model that we were in even 10 years ago. And yet, even though they admit that that’s the truth in today’s economy, they are fighting us tooth and nail to stick to the same economic system that is outmoded, outdated. They want us to step back in time.”

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which is negotiating on behalf of studios, has said it presented actors with a generous deal that included the biggest bump in minimum pay in 35 years among other benefits. Since talks broke off and Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists commenced the strike, the sides have not negotiated and no talks are scheduled.

“We may be on strike but I said to them on July 12 we are ready to continue talking tomorrow and every day after until we reach a deal,” said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, chief negotiator for SAG-AFTRA. “And I’ve said that every day since to the media, to them, to anyone who would listen. SAG-AFTRA is ready, willing and able to return to the bargaining table.

“The only reason we aren’t there now is because those companies said that they didn’t want to deal with people who were uncivilized and because those companies said they wouldn’t be ready to talk for quite some time,” added Crabtree-Ireland.

Many actors Tuesday cast the strike in personal terms. Slater said the union’s health care helped sustain his father’s life. Slater’s father, the actor Michael Hawkins, died last November. Liza Colón-Zayas, the 51-year-old Bronx-born actor of the Hulu hit series “The Bear,” said her lifetime of hard work isn’t paying off.

“I have struggled 35 years to get here only to find residuals have dwindled exponentially,” said Colón-Zayas. “If you can announce the highest-viewed this and the highest profits in that, then you can track our residuals. So we need to come to the table but we need to come to the table in good faith that there will be transparency in how we are being paid by streaming. We need you to open the books.”



Movie Review: The Villains Steal the Show in ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’

 From left, Pedro Pascal, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn arrive at the premiere of "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" on Monday, July 21, 2025, at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
From left, Pedro Pascal, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn arrive at the premiere of "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" on Monday, July 21, 2025, at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
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Movie Review: The Villains Steal the Show in ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’

 From left, Pedro Pascal, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn arrive at the premiere of "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" on Monday, July 21, 2025, at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
From left, Pedro Pascal, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn arrive at the premiere of "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" on Monday, July 21, 2025, at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)

More than six decades after Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created a superhero team to rival the Justice League, the Fantastic Four finally get a worthy big-screen adaption in a spiffy ’60s-era romp, bathed in retrofuturism and bygone American optimism.

Though the Fantastic Four go to the very origins of Marvel Comics, their movie forays have been marked by missteps and disappointments. The first try was a Roger Corman-produced, low-budget 1994 film that was never even released.

But, after some failed reboots and a little rights maneuvering, Matt Shakman’s “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” is the first Fantastic Four movie released by Marvel Studios. And a sense of returning to Marvel roots permeates this one, an endearingly earnest superhero drama about family and heroism, filled with modernist “Jetsons” designs that hark back to a time when the future held only promise.

“First Steps,” with a title that nods to Neil Armstrong, quickly reminds that before the Fantastic Four were superheroes, they were astronauts. Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) and Ben Grimm (a soulful Ebon Moss-Bachrach) flew into space but return altered by cosmic rays. “We came back with anomalies,” explains Reed, sounding like me after a family road trip.

They are now, respectively, the bendy Mister Fantastic, the fast-disappearing Invisible Woman, the fiery Human Torch and the Thing, a craggy CGI boulder of a man. In the glimpses of them as astronauts, the images are styled after NASA footage of Apollo 11, like those seen in the great documentaries “For All Mankind” and “Apollo 11.”

But part of the fun of the Fantastic Four has always been that while the foursome might have the right stuff, they also bicker and joke and argue like any other family. The chemistry here never feels intimate enough in “First Steps” to quite capture that interplay, but the cast is good, particularly Kirby.

In the first moments of “First Steps,” Sue sets down a positive pregnancy test before a surprised Reed. That night at dinner — Moss-Bachrach, now an uncle rather than a cousin, is again at work in the kitchen — Ben and Johnny immediately guess what’s up. The rest of the world is also eager to find out what, if any, powers the baby will have.

We aren’t quite in our world, but a very similar parallel one called Earth-828. New York looks about the same, and world leaders gather in a version of the United Nations named the Future Foundation. The Thing wears a Brooklyn Dodgers cap. Someone sounding a lot like Walter Cronkite reads the news.

And there’s a lot to read when the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) suddenly hovers over the city, announcing: “I herald your end. I herald Galactus.” The TV blares, as it could on so many days: “Earth in Peril. Developing Story.”

Yes, the Earth (or some Earth) might be in danger, but did you get a look at that Silver Surfer? That’s Johnny Storm’s response, and perhaps ours, too. She's all chrome, like a smelted Chrysler Building, with slicked-back hair and melancholy eyes. He’s immediately taken by her, but she shoots off into space. In a rousing, NASA-like launch (the original Kirby and Lee comic came eight years before the moon landing), the Fantastic Four blast off into the unknown to meet this Galactus.

But if the Silver Surfer made an impression, Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson) does even more so. Fantastic Four movies have always before gone straight for Doctor Doom as a villain, but his entrance, this time, is being held up for “Avengers: Doomsday.” Still, Galactus, a planet-eating tyrant, is no slouch. A mechanical colossus and evident fan of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” he sits on an enormous throne in space. Sensing enormous power in Sue’s unborn child, he offers to spare Earth for the baby.

What follows casts motherhood — its empowerments and sacrifices — onto a cosmic plane. There’s a nifty chase sequence in space that plays out during contractions. The two “Incredibles” movies covered some similar ground, in both retro design and stretchy parent and superhuman baby, with notably more zip and comic verve than “The Fantastic Four.” That's part of the trouble of not getting a proper movie for so long: Better films have already come along inspired by the '60s comic.

But as good as Vanessa Kirby is in “First Steps,” the movie is never better than when the Silver Surfer or Galactus are around. Shakman, a former child actor who’s directed mostly in television (most relevantly, “WandaVision”), proves especially adept at capturing the enormous scale of Galactus. “First Steps” may be, at heart, a kaiju movie.

What it certainly is, though, is a very solid comic book movie. It’s a little surface over substance, and the time capsule feeling is pervasive. This is an earnest-enough superhero movie where even the angry mob protesting the superheroes turns quiet and pensive. I was more likely to be moved by a really handsome chalkboard than I was by its vision of motherhood.

But, especially for a superhero team that’s never before quite taken flight on screen, “First Steps” is a sturdy beginning, with impeccable production design by Kasra Farahani and a rousing score by Michael Giacchino. Even if the unifying space-age spirit of Kirby and Lee's comic feels very long ago, indeed.