In fact, Lawrence, as the highest-paid actress in the July 2014–June 2015 time period, pulled in a full $28m less in than the highest paid actor, Robert Downey Jr. And while she and American Hustle co-star Amy Adams pocketed a 7% cut of the profits from the Oscar-winning film, their co-stars Bradley Cooper, Christian Bale and Jeremy Renner took home 9%.
In an essay for Lenny last year, Lawrence blamed herself for not fighting harder for her pay. “When the Sony hack happened and I found out how much less I was being paid than the lucky people with dicks, I didn’t get mad at Sony. I got mad at myself… I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early.”
Which is partly why this news about Robin Wright is just so damn cool.
Wright, who plays the coolly calculating Claire Underwood in House of Cards, revealed at the recent ‘Insight Dialogues‘ talk in NYC how she gave the show’s bosses an ultimatum: pay her the same as co-star Kevin Spacey, or she’d walk.
“It was the perfect paradigm,” she said. “There are very few films or TV shows where the patriarch and the matriarch are equal. And they are in House Of Cards.“I was looking at the statistics and Claire Underwood’s character was more popular for a period of time. So I capitalised on it. I was like, ‘You better pay me or I’m going to go public.’ And they did.”
Critics of the wage gap at writ often point to women taking time out of the workforce to have children as a contributing factor, something that Wright fully acknowledges.
“Because I wasn’t working full time, I wasn’t building my salary bracket,” she said. “If you don’t build that, with notoriety and presence, you’re not in the game anymore. You become a B-list actor. You’re not box office material.“You don’t hold the value you would have held if you had done four movies a year like Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett did during the time I was raising my kids… Now I’m kind of on a comeback at 50 years old.”
A 2014 study called Age, Gender, and Compensation: A Study of Hollywood Movie Stars found that both men and women have a numerical turning point, where their till-now steadily increasing compensation takes a stark nosedive.
For men, that’s 51. For women, that’s 34.
Which makes Robin Wright age 50 going head-to-head with Netflix for equal pay a fucking baller.
Photo: Netflix.
