14 DAY TRIAL // In last November’s Sony Hack, among the gazillion things that got out in the media that Sony executives and industry people would have rather kept private, was also the fact that the leading men in “American Hustle” were paid considerably more than their female counterparts, Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams.
A couple of months later, word got out online that, in light of this revelation, Charlize Theron demanded a renegotiation of her salary for the “Snow White and the Huntsman” sequel, “The Huntsman,” which is now in production and will be out in 2016. Theron confirms it in Elle UK Magazine.
Charlize Theron was angry
The Oscar-winning actress is promoting “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which will premiere on May 15. She talks about working with her current boyfriend, Sean Penn, and her career so far, including that time she felt objectified on “2 Days and the Valley,” and finding out that pay disparity between sexes was real in Hollywood.
She tells Elle that she was really furious when she learned that Adams and Lawrence had been paid less for “American Hustle” than Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper and Jeremy Renner, because she is convinced they’re definitely just as talented as these guys.
Moreover, they all had about the same amount of time on the screen, so the two women were billed as leading ladies, not supportive acts. There was no other explanation for the smaller paychecks other than the fact that they were being paid as women, and not as actors.
Asking for what was hers
So Theron looked again into her contract for “The Huntsman” and called studio bosses for a chat. Rumor has it that she was paid less than Chris Hemsworth for the first film, even though she’s an Oscar-winner and he’s hardly had any success outside of Marvel’s superhero movies.
If you’ve seen “Snow White and the Huntsman,” you know that Charlize was what made it work, not Hemsworth.
As per the same unconfirmed rumors, studio bosses wanted to do a similar stunt for the sequel.
“I have to give them credit because once I asked, they said yes. They did not fight it,” Charlize recalls for Elle. “And maybe that’s the message: That we just need to put our foot down. This is a good time for us to bring this to a place of fairness, and girls need to know that being a feminist is a good thing. It doesn’t mean that you hate men. It means equal rights. If you’re doing the same job, you should be compensated and treated in the same way.”