“I hope the entertainment industry will never be the same,” Jessica Chastain responded when asked about the current watershed moment in Hollywood during a roundtable hosted by The Hollywood Reporter. New reports about harassment and abuse are emerging on a daily basis. But as the two-time Oscar nominee pointed out, there’s an extensive “history of abuse against women in our industry, and it’s never been addressed.” She explained, “I’m devastated by all the stories that have come out because it’s heartbreaking, but at the same time I feel hopeful because we’re not ignoring it anymore.”
Chastain (“Molly’s Game”) and the other actresses assembled — Jennifer Lawrence (“mother!”), Emma Stone (“Battle of the Sexes”), Saoirse Ronan (“Lady Bird”), Mary J. Blige (“Mudbound”), and Allison Janney (“I, Tonya”) — certainly didn’t ignore the evolving climate during the candid conversation, which touched on everything from equal pay to the dearth of opportunities for women writers and directors. We’ve assembled some of the highlights below.
Lawrence on abuse outside of Hollywood: “The big misconception, though, is that this is just in the entertainment industry. Once again, the entertainment industry is kind of the stage on which you can see the inner workings of problems that are all over the world. If a flight attendant comes forward about a pilot, it doesn’t end up in the news because nobody knows about it. That doesn’t mean that there’s less sexual abuse going on anywhere else in the world, in any other place of work. But fortunately, we’re starting the conversation now.”
Stone on the work yet to come: It’s a huge conversation for our industry, but I would hope that this is only the tipping point for us to discuss equal pay for equal work for women across every industry.
Chastain on her own fight for fair pay and the importance of hiring women behind the scenes: “A lot of the problem in terms of wage equality, but also in terms of [female] writers and directors coming on to projects, starts at the agency level. I now have a production company, and I’m asking [my agents], ‘Can you guys send me a list of writers?’ And it’s all men. I’m realizing that they’re going to submit the writers that have the higher quote because they get a percentage of the quote. So that’s leading us to why there’s not so many female filmmakers, right? But [with actors], I don’t understand — if you’re a very successful agency and they know what everyone is making on the film — how an agent is OK with you making a third of your co-star’s salary. After ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ I was sent a lot of scripts where it was a female protagonist, and they wouldn’t do my deal until they knew who the male actor was because they needed to do his deal first and then see what was left over. She explained, “I decided I’m not doing that anymore. So from now on, if someone has something they’re bringing to me, great, let’s do my deal [now]. But also, if someone is showing up for three weeks of a two-month film, they’re not getting paid more than me.”
Lawrence on equal pay: “It’s much easier for me now to be paid fairly. The reason I spoke out about it [after the Sony hack revealed she was paid less than her male ‘American Hustle’ co-stars] was really — we’re in the industry, everybody is looking at us, if we’re going through this, every woman in the world is going through this. But the real problem is the normalization of it. It’s the reason why your agents don’t think twice about paying you a third of your [co-star’s paycheck] — because it’s been so normalized for so long.”
Chastain on whether the “culture of leveraging power and the culture of abuse [can] change”: “Whenever you have one demographic that’s in charge of the livelihood of another, you’re going to have abuses of power.”
Lawrence on repercussions for speaking out: “I finally made the decision to stand up for myself, and then I went to go to the bathroom at work and one of the producers stopped me and was like, ‘You know, we can hear you on the microphone, you’ve been really unruly.’ Which was not true, but basically my job was threatened because the director said something fucked up to me and I said, ‘That’s sick, you can’t talk to me like that,’ and then I was punished, and I got afraid that I wasn’t going to be hired again.” She added, “I was called difficult and a nightmare. I think a lot of people aren’t coming forward because they’re afraid they’re not going to work again. You need to be able to say, ‘This is wrong’ and have somebody do something about it instead of saying, ‘Oh, it’s wrong? Well, you’re fired.’”
Head over to THR to read the full feature and watch footage of the star-studded conversation.
