Actors, let me grab your attention for a moment. Yes, even you — the one balancing your phone on a stack of books to tape yet another scene where you play “Person Who Didn’t Book the Role.” I want to talk about H.R. 721, the Performing Artist Tax Parity Act, which is basically the closest thing we’ve had to financial oxygen in decades. And yet somehow, most actors don’t even know it exists.
Right now, the federal government believes that if you earn more than sixteen thousand dollars a year — yes, sixteen thousand — you’re too wealthy to qualify for the Qualified Performing Artist tax deduction. That number was set in 1986. I was 41 then. Gas was cheap, headshots were cheap, and I still had functioning knees. Meanwhile, everything in our industry has skyrocketed in cost except the one deduction designed to help working actors survive.
Enter H.R. 721, which finally proposes raising that absurd income cap to $100,000 for individuals and $200,000 for couples. In other words, it drags the tax code out of the Reagan years and into something that resembles the economy we’re actually living in. It even acknowledges that agent and manager commissions are legitimate business expenses — you know, the way everyone else has already acknowledged them.
Now, this is the part that should irritate you. This bill has been introduced over and over, like an actor who keeps showing up for the same audition and keeps getting told, “Thanks, we’ll be in touch.” It showed up in 2019. Dead. Reappeared in 2021. Dead. Tried again in 2023. Dead. Same story in 2024. And here we are with the 2025 version, currently sitting in committee like an unpaid extra waiting twelve hours for a director who doesn’t know their name.
Why does this happen? Because Congress doesn’t pass bills just because they’re good ideas. They pass bills when enough people make noise. And actors, for all our gifts — we can cry on cue, fall down a staircase dramatically, and express heartbreak in a single closeup — somehow lose our voices when it comes to advocating for ourselves. We wait for “someone else” to handle it. And that’s exactly how nothing gets done.
If we let this bill die again, we can’t blame Congress alone. We’ll have to blame ourselves for being too quiet when it mattered.
And let’s be clear: this bill isn’t about politics. It’s about survival. If you spend money on headshots, classes, agents, managers, wardrobe, mileage, self-tape equipment, union dues, or the therapy you probably need after your last 23 auditions… then H.R. 721 affects you directly. Not the celebrities. Not the Marvel leads. You — the working actor who keeps the entertainment world turning while juggling day jobs and memorizing sides at midnight.
So here’s my message as your friendly 81-year-old actor who’s been around this block more times than I can count: this bill matters. It’s overdue. And if we want real change, we have to stop assuming someone else will fight for us. Actors are loud when it comes to roles — now we need to be loud about legislation that actually impacts our paychecks. Because if we don’t advocate for ourselves, no one else will. And we’ll be sitting here again next year, reintroducing the exact same bill and wondering why nothing ever changes.