Longtime Union Leader Steps Fully Into Hollywood’s Spotlight

Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the executive director and chief negotiator for the actors’ union, has spent the past two decades toiling behind the scenes during contract talks. The spotlight, he knows, is for the SAG-AFTRA president, usually a well-known performer like the current office holder, Fran Drescher.

But ever since the guild went on strike on July 14 for the first time in 40 years, things have been different.

In the past three months, Mr. Crabtree-Ireland, 51, has stepped out from behind the negotiating table and made fiery speeches, walked film festival red carpets and reached out to the union’s younger members via Instagram reels. His more frequent appearances have given people ample opportunity to see the tattoos on his forearms, a visual clue to how much the professional and the personal are intertwined for him. On the right are five symbols — a record, a play button, a film reel, a megaphone and a radio antenna — representing the contracts he’s negotiated for union members in the music, film/TV, radio, commercial, video and broadcast industries. On his left arm is a coil with five loops that represent the five children he has adopted with his husband, John.

“It’s not just a job for me,” he said in an interview. “This is where I’ve spent the vast majority of my professional career, and I really care about what happens to our members.”

Now, however, Mr. Crabtree-Ireland is facing his most challenging public moment. Come Monday, when the union returns to the negotiating table with the studios in an attempt to resolve the strike that has much of Hollywood at a standstill, all eyes will be on him.

(Ted Sarandos, a co-chairman of Netflix; David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery; Donna Langley, the chief content officer of NBCUniversal Studio Group; and Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, will also be in attendance, along with the chief negotiator for the studios, Carol Lombardini.)