Can You Believe It?
Denver, CO (WorkersCompensation.com) – Actress Brooke Shields, president of Actors Equity, said she had to pay a stealth visit to the restaurant owned by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone to help workers there with their working conditions.
Shields said she visited Casa Bonita earlier this year, after several of the restaurant’s live performers complained about working conditions. The iconic restaurant was purchased by Parker and Stone during the pandemic and refurbished. Casa Bonita has for years featured Mexican food and live performers – including cliff divers and actors in gorilla suits – who entertain diners.
Shields said she delivered a letter to the restaurant’s owners on behalf of the employees after other methods of communication failed.
“It was slightly an ambush,” Shields told CNN. “You try doing things respectfully, and then you’re not met with equal respect … so you have to resort to other tactics.”
Casa Bonita has 80 cast members who unionized under Actors’ Equity in 2024. They have been in negotiations with management for more than a year, union officials said, and had held more than a dozen bargaining sessions with management. Cast members have complained about working conditions and asked for salary increases.
Some of the cast members have claimed that cliff divers in the dive team have suffered injuries like hypothermia and chlorine toxicity.
“We’re not asking management to account for 100 percent of incidents. This is a big restaurant. There’s four bars. You can’t account for all human behavior. What we don’t have right now is a set of policies that are clearly in place about how to tackle rowdy customers,” Riley Holmes, performer and a member of the union’s bargaining committee, told the Denverite. “What are we as performers allowed to do for our own safety? We get a very nebulous, ‘If you feel like you’re in danger, you can leave.’”
Diver Rachel Suter, who’d been with the restaurant for three years, said she got a concussion underwater last year and was out for three months.
“Not only are we performing and doing many different duties within this job, but also kind of risking our bodies and that sort of thing, which I don’t think management appreciates at all,” Suter said.
The union said in a letter that the cliff divers face extra danger on the job, but management won’t commit to $4 a week to supplemental workers’ compensation to protect them in the event that something goes wrong.
The performers also face sexual assault from the restaurant’s patrons. One cast member, who performs in a gorilla suit, told CNN they’ve been grabbed sexually 20-plus times since beginning their job there.
Actors said each character has a handler, but staff says there is only so much that can be done to protect the person inside the suit as they interact with customers and pose for photos.
“Most performers here who get in the suit, it’s not an ‘if’ but a ‘when’ you’re going to get your butt grabbed, your breasts grabbed. You add alcohol to that, and there will be people who will be jerks, and they will get drunk,” Holmes said. “It’s not okay, but it’s more so about management not having a clear set of procedures that we are made aware of.”
The performers also pointed out that there’s no signage stating not to touch the performers, like the messaging someone would see at a haunted house.
The restaurant’s management released a statement that said, “We value all of our team members and their well-being. As a policy we do not comment on ongoing labor negotiations.”
Parker and Stone rescued the restaurant from bankruptcy in 2021, and said they have spent around $50 million renovating and improving the restaurant. After signing a five-year streaming deal with Paramount last year worth $1.5 billion, the pair told Jimmy Kimmel Live, “We would be the richest comedians if it wasn’t for Casa Bonita … We think we might make our money back sometime like 2040/2045.”
Paramount chronicled the duo’s struggle to revive the restaurant in the 2024 documentary, Casa Bonita Mi Amor.
