Squeaky Wheel Gets The Minimum Grease Needed To Avoid A Lawsuit
As I write this in summer of 2023, Screen Actors Guild is on strike, and I am among the last actors to get a paycheck for working on a TV series. I was a background actress on a show the day before the strike began. The casting agency who casts that show, Waldorf Casting, blacklisted me over a year ago. In order to get that single day of work from them I had to file a complaint with New York State Division of Human Rights, make six complaints with Screen Actors Guild, and speak to the diversity department at Disney. All for a single day of entry-level work.
I shall now tell the tale of my epic journey to play “Hospital Patient # 21.”
Waldorf Casting found me useful in 2018. Back then they cast the extras on a Netflix show, Tales of the City. It had several LGBT story lines, and I was among a relatively small number of openly transgender actresses back then, so you can see me in the background in quite a few episodes.
Back then, it was still considered acceptable to cast Olympia Dukakis as a transgender woman, despite her not being trans. It was also one of Elliot Page’s last female roles as “Ellen” Page. But they seemed to be making an effort to cast the extras properly.
The work began dwindling as soon as Tales of the City wrapped. Waldorf Casting booked me a couple of times on Michael Che’s show, and the legal drama Bull. Although they never let me play a lawyer on Bull, or any other legal drama; I was always a pedestrian walking by the courthouse, and never a lawyer walking out of it. This is also the casting agency that forced me to dress as a man to work on Sony’s The Blacklist. On two separate episodes.
Ultimately the work disappeared altogether. Between February 2022, and June 2023, they booked me on one job. It was an overnight shoot on a Friday night, in New Jersey. They emailed me at 7:30 at night, and gave me 90 minutes to be at Port Authority for a bus to New Jersey. They were desperate to fill the role, and I was clearly the last actress in the city they wanted to work with.
I asked Waldorf to speak informally about the problem, and they refused. Later I filed charges of employment discrimination with the New York State Division of Human Rights (NY State ruled in Waldorf’s favor, but I have a new case with the New York City government). I also filed complaints with Screen Actors Guild against several shows that use this agency. These included Feud, the recent Truman Capote biography series; and I feel Tru would have been delighted to have me as a pedestrian in the background of his biography.
My complaints eventually caught the attention of Disney. Disney is currently producing a TV series about football, and Waldorf Casting is in charge of hiring the extras. They refused to cast me right up until the day before the strike began.
I had scheduled a meeting with the diversity team at Disney just two days before the strike. Several hours before that meeting, Waldorf Casting placed an ad looking for “Hospital Types.” I responded to the ad with a picture of me in nurse scrubs, and a note saying that I was speaking with Disney that about why I wasn’t allowed to work on the show.
The meeting with Disney ended at 4:22 in the afternoon. At 4:56 I received an email offering the role of “Hospital Patient #21”. My call time was less than 11 hours later, at 3:30 am that very night.
This was the second day of work I have had in over two months. And the only job in six weeks. That’s from all of the casting agencies in New York combined!
When I arrived on set I heard other actresses complaining about the lack of work lately. For a moment I doubted myself. “Am I paranoid?” I asked myself. “Maybe everyone is in the same boat as I am.”
I asked the woman sitting across from me, “Have you had much work lately?”
“Oh no,” she replied, shaking her head dramatically, and making a dismal expression. “I’ve only had about four days of work in the last two months.”
This was my second day of work in the same stretch of time. She had twice as much work as I had, but she considered that to be a dismal dry spell.
If I am having this much trouble getting entry-level work in an industry that claims to support trans people, then just imagine how bad employment discrimination is in other industries, and in other states.
I’d like to say that the moral of this story is “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” But the real moral is “Sometimes the only way to get any grease is to waterboard the guy with the oil can.”
UPDATE May 9th 2024: Disney got back to me two months later, and informed me that they had thoroughly investigated themselves and determined they have done nothing wrong. I have filed a new blacklisting case against Waldorf Casting which is still underway.