(L-R) SAG-AFTRA president Sean Astin and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland at the Actor Awards in March.

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Talking to SAG-AFTRA chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland and president Sean Astin in 2026, it’s easy to forget that their union waged a painful, prolonged strike just three years earlier.

After emerging from a months-long negotiation with studios and streamers, the pair are complimentary of the studios’ approach under new president Greg Hessinger. Astin asserts that negotiations don’t always have to include brinksmanship. They describe how they leveraged the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers’ desire for a longer deal term to get AI protections for members and a long-awaited merger for separate pension plans. No taunts aimed at company CEOs or themed picket lines necessary, like during their 2023 strike.

“Obviously the companies really wanted a longer term,” says Crabtree-Ireland, who is also the union’s national executive director. “What can we maybe achieve that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to if we entertain that idea? And that’s how we ultimately ended up there.”

There’s a change in tone this year, for sure, but the parties weren’t exactly holding hands and singing kumbaya for three months while they bargained. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Crabtree-Ireland and Astin describe the achievements and disappointments of their latest negotiation. As Astin put it, “I wouldn’t be doing my job as president of the union if I couldn’t give you a laundry list of a thousand things I thought we should be getting next time.”

What are the most important, headline gains in this deal in your view?

Duncan Crabtree-Ireland: This deal that has a lot of important stuff in it. If I were selecting a few things to highlight, I would say one certainly would be the agreement to merge our pension and retirement plans and the specific process for making that happen. That’s obviously something we’ve been looking to accomplish since merger, since 2012. And so to finally have that pathway laid out and to have an effective date and details, including additional contributions to make it possible, is very gratifying. Another I would say is the artificial intelligence protections. Obviously it’s a topic that’s been constantly under discussion since 2022 and for good reason. There are really meaningful improvements in the digital replication part of the contract, but even more so we have, from my perspective, really significant advances in dealing with synthetics going from our existing contract language … to now [a] specific statement of principles embodying and embracing human performance and an agreement to limit any use of synthetics only to cases where there’s a “significant additional value” provided to a production. And that has to be a “significant additional value” not only over a person, but also over a digital replica of a person. And so that is a meaningful limitation on the use of synthetic technology in the industry and by these major companies that no one’s ever seen before. So I think that’s really a crucial advance.

Obviously the WGA agreed to a four-year deal before you did, which set a precedent, but why did you feel that a four-year deal was worth your while, especially given the pace at which AI is evolving?

Crabtree-Ireland: Really for us it required the right agreement. It required the right elements of the agreement and that included making sure that the AI provisions gave the kind of protection that left us confident our members would be well cared for during a four-year term, but also other provisions that were really important to us, whether that’s residuals, whether that’s obviously the merger of our pension and retirement plans, the companies are putting significant money into both of those areas as well as a whole host of other things in the contract. If you’ve seen the summary, you know that there’s like 56 different major areas that are covered in this contract, that’s quite a lot. And I guess I just want to say for me, and I believe Sean will agree with this and I think our committee, we didn’t come at this as ‘the Writers Guild agreed to four years, so we’re going to agree to four years.’ We came at this from the perspective of ‘What is it that we really want to achieve in this negotiation’? And obviously the companies really wanted a longer term. What can we maybe achieve that we wouldn’t have o

SAG Negotiators Talk AI, Pension Plan Changes in 2026 Contract