As Taraji P. Henson instructed us practically a yr in the past, there’s a persistent pay disparity subject in Hollywood — and non-white actresses, no matter their stature, are sometimes on the dropping finish.
“I’m simply uninterested in working so exhausting, being gracious at what I do [and] getting paid a fraction of the price,” stated an emotional Henson throughout a Dec. 2023 interview with Gayle King. “I’m uninterested in listening to my sisters say the identical factor again and again. You get drained.”
It’s a typical narrative many Black ladies know all too properly, so it’s unsurprising that many discovered themselves up in arms amid rampant and unsubstantiated rumors that Cynthia Erivo solely made $1 million in comparison with Ariana Grande’s reported $15 million wage for “Depraved.” Nonetheless, these rumors have been confirmed false on Tuesday, when, in response to rising hypothesis on social media, a spokesperson for Common, the manufacturing studio behind the blockbuster film musical, launched an announcement to The Hollywood Reporter and different shops, addressing the controversy.
“Reviews of pay disparity between Cynthia and Ariana are utterly false and primarily based on web fodder. The ladies obtained equal pay for his or her work on ‘Depraved,’” learn the assertion, which was reportedly corroborated by “a number of sources aware of the state of affairs.”
In accordance with Deadline, the rumor inexplicably originated on a Reddit thread. It stays unknown how a lot “Depraved’s” lead actresses really earned for his or her work on the already-acclaimed two-part movie, which reportedly had a pre-marketing manufacturing finances of $320 million and is presently dominating the vacation field workplace. Nonetheless, the furor over the alleged pay disparity, nevertheless unfounded, displays a really actual and protracted pay hole for Black ladies that’s well-documented in Hollywood and extends to numerous different industries.
“I’ve a profession that’s in all probability similar to Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Sigourney Weaver,” stated Viola Davis in 2018, as beforehand reported by theGrio. “All of them got here out of Yale, they got here out of Juilliard, they got here out of NYU. They’d the identical path as me, and but I’m nowhere close to them. Not so far as cash, not so far as job alternatives, nowhere near it.
“Folks say, ‘You’re a Black Meryl Streep … We love you. There isn’t any one such as you,” the EGOT winner continued. “OK, then if there’s nobody like me, you suppose I’m that, you pay me what I’m value.”
That very same yr, Octavia Spencer made headlines when she revealed that fellow actress Jessica Chastain had helped her negotiate equal pay for a undertaking the 2 have been engaged on collectively. As reported by Selection, Chastain, already a staunch advocate for closing the gender pay hole in Hollywood, hadn’t been conscious of the equally persistent wage hole between white and non-white actresses till Spencer introduced it to her consideration.
“I instructed her my story, and we talked numbers, and [Chastain] was quiet, and he or she had no concept that that’s what it was like for girls of shade,” Spencer recalled throughout a panel at that yr’s Sundance Movie Pageant.
Moved to motion, Chastain helped Spencer negotiate a “favored nations” contract, during which the 2 Oscar winners can be paid comparable charges.
“She had been underpaid for therefore lengthy. After I found that, I noticed that I may tie her deal to mine to carry up her quote,” Chastain later tweeted in response to Spencer’s admission. “Males ought to begin doing this with their feminine co-stars.”
Additional elaborating on the problem, Spencer tweeted, “I ought to make clear that I’m making 5x my wage as a result of Jessica stood with me. I don’t know what or if it value her something so far as her charge, I simply know she stood with me, and I’m eternally grateful.”
Gestures like Chastain’s are uncommon, and whereas favored nations contracts have gotten extra frequent in Hollywood productions — probably together with Erivo and Grande’s agreements for “Depraved” — they’re nonetheless not a regularity. Neither do they compensate for a system during which Black expertise is systematically devalued, as Henson, an Oscar and Emmy nominee and Golden Globe and SAG Award winner, identified when discussing her personal experiences with pay disparities.
“I hear folks go, ‘You’re employed loads,’” she continued. “I’ve to. The maths ain’t mathing. If you begin working loads, you could have a group. Large payments include what we do. We don’t do that alone … there’s an entire total group behind us [and] they must receives a commission.”
Breaking down how even actors incomes a seemingly exorbitant Hollywood wage — for instance, $10 million — sometimes find yourself netting a 3rd of that quantity after each taxes and group are paid, Henson emphasised how being paid much less to start out with undermines any alternative to get forward.
“I’m solely human, and it appears each time I do one thing and I break one other glass ceiling, when it’s time to renegotiate, I’m on the backside once more like I by no means did what I simply did,” she stated. “And I’m drained.”
If acclaimed actresses are struggling to be paid their value, their experiences replicate these of non-famous Black ladies throughout industries. Regardless of enrolling in school at greater charges, on common, American Black ladies with full-time employment are paid 69 cents for each greenback made by white, non-Hispanic males — and Lean In estimates that hole is barely wider for Black ladies with bachelor’s levels, who earn 36% lower than equally educated white males, or 64 cents on the greenback. Latinas and Native American ladies fare even worse, at 58 cents on the greenback.
Additional, Black ladies sometimes make 12% lower than their white feminine counterparts. The disparities confronted by too many ladies of shade are amplified yearly by initiatives like Black Girls’s Equal Pay Day — and but, on the present charge of development, pay fairness isn’t projected to be achieved till 2227. Within the meantime, “a Black lady beginning her profession right this moment stands to lose $884,800 over the course of a 40-year profession if we don’t shut the hole,” studies the Nationwide Girls’s Regulation Heart.
With these very real-world dynamics at play, the uproar round Erivo’s seeming pay disparity, nevertheless inaccurate, was little question triggering for thousands and thousands of Black ladies nonetheless working twice as exhausting to earn roughly a 3rd much less. Whereas Erivo presently could also be “defying gravity” within the largest fantasy movie of the yr, we are able to’t deny the gravity of pay disparity and its repercussive results on Black ladies’s careers, households, communities and psychological well being. To paraphrase Davis: Pay us what we’re value.
