Artists can’t get by on awards and adulation alone, so we’re thrilled that Patricia Arquette is using her post-Globes spotlight to bravely broach the topic of compensation.

“It’s important to me as an actor to be able to make a living [but] I’m going to tell you something,” she said in a recent interview. “I paid more money to my babysitter and my dog walker than I made on Boyhood, and to be in Boyhood!”

The film has made a domestic gross of $24 million and a worldwide gross of $43 million, which isn’t Avengers money, but certainly enough to adequately recompense its best performer (in my opinion). But sure, that’s not how contracts work.

In a different interview, Arquette added her two cents to the ongoing conversation sparked by Russell Crowe’s nincompoopish pronouncement that over-40 actresses don’t face any ageist discrimination.

Arquette first explained why she wanted out of the ingenue roles that Crowe claimed women covet most: “This idea of the world expecting you to remain an ingenue forever — it’s a very short shelf life if you’re going to commit to that as your career, and I knew that early…. I was trying to get out of it for years.”

She then asserted her right to age: “I gotta get old, people, do you understand? … I need space to grow and get old and be a human being. I don’t want to be trapped in your ingenue bubble.”

[via The Guardian]