Hollywood Strike Leaves Influencers Sidelined and Confused

Deanna Giulietti is not in the actors’ union, but she turned down $28,000 last week because of its strike.

Ms. Giulietti, a 29-year-old content creator with 1.8 million TikTok followers, had received an offer to promote the new season of Hulu’s hit show “Only Murders in the Building.”

But SAG-AFTRA, as the union is known, recently issued rules stating that any influencer who engages in promotion for one of the Hollywood studios the actors are striking against will be ineligible for membership. (Disney is the majority owner of Hulu.) That gave Ms. Giulietti, who also acts and aspires to one day join the union, reason enough to decline the offer from Influential, a marketing agency working with Hulu.

The union’s rule is part of a variety of aggressive tactics that hit at a pivotal moment for Hollywood labor and shows its desire to assert itself in a new era and with a different, mostly younger wave of creative talent.

“I want to be in these Netflix shows, I want to be in the Hulu shows, but we’re standing by the writers, we’re standing by SAG,” Ms. Giulietti said. “People write me off whenever I say I’m an influencer, and I’m like, ‘No, I really feel I could be making the difference here.’”

That difference comes at a cost. In addition to the Hulu deal, Ms. Giulietti recently declined a $5,000 offer from the app TodayTix to promote the Searchlight Pictures movie “Theater Camp.” (Disney also owns Searchlight.) She said she was living at home with her parents in Cheshire, Conn., and putting off renting an apartment in New York City while she saw how the strike — which, along with a writers’ strike, could go on for months — would affect her income.