The Writers Guild Of America announced late on Friday night that it was expelling two of its high-profile members, Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar, over their conduct during the 2023 strikes, Variety reports. The Oldboy writer/director and Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould writer were both found to have broken strike rules by writing on their 2024 Robert Downey Jr. project The Sympathizer during the union-mandated stopdown.
The expulsions from the writers’ union are not, to be clear, a strictly academic matter: Studios that are signatories to the WGA’s collective bargaining agreement—i.e., all the major Hollywood players, including Disney, Netflix, and The Sympathizer‘s home network HBO—are required to use WGA screenwriters, so both men are pretty much cut out of American film and TV production. Park and McKellar are apparently just two of seven writers who were ultimately disciplined over their conduct during the strikes; others, like Sullivan’s Crossing creator Roma Roth (unsuccessfully) appealed, making their names public, but the WGA decided this weekend to publicize the rest of the list as well. (Bates Motel co-creator Anthony Cipriano was also revealed to have been suspended from the WGA until May 2026 for writing on 2024 thriller film The Last Breath.)
The Sympathizer entered and exited the public consciousness with surprising quickness last April, despite Downey’s high-profile casting as multiple antagonistic figures cropping up in the life of a Vietnam refugee (Hoa Xuande) who is secretly a double agent for the Communist faction. The show was adapted (mostly by Park and McKellar, who are credited, sometimes with a third writer, on all seven of its episodes) from a Pulitzer-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen.
