Natalie Portman is the latest Hollywood actor to call out the film industry for gender discrimination. Post film awards season, the Oscar-winning actor slammed the gender pay gap as ‘crazy’ – calling it even worse in Hollywood than in other jobs.
In an interview with Marie Claire, Portman revealed that she was paid three times less than her male co-star Ashton Kutcher for her role in the 2011 romantic comedy No Strings Attached.
“Compared to men, in most professions, women make 80 cents to the dollar,” Portman told the publication. “In Hollywood, we are making 30 cents to the dollar.”
The 35-year-old star, who won the best actress Oscar in 2011 for her role in Black Swan and plays Jackie Kennedy in a forthcoming biopic about the former U.S. First Lady – said the pay disparity was ‘crazy’.
The World Economic Forum, a non-profit foundation, predicts the global gender pay disparity may take up to 170 years to close. The average global gap stood at 59 per cent in 2016, it said in a report released last October.
Hollywood’s gender pay gap was highlighted in 2015 when hacked documents from film studio Sony Pictures revealed major pay disparities between top actors.
They showed that U.S. actress Jennifer Lawrence was paid less than her male co-stars Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper in the 2013 black comedy American Hustle.
Hacked emails showed that Bale and Cooper earned nine per cent of the film’s total profits, whilst Lawrence was only paid seven per cent.
Lawrence later said she was “mad at herself” after learning about the pay gap because she had “failed as a negotiator”.
Other movie stars – such as Sandra Bullock and Jessica Chastain – have also hit out at pay discrimination.
The 2017 awards season began on Sunday with the Golden Globes dinner in Beverly Hills, kicking off two months of red carpets and black tie events, culminating in the Academy Awards ceremony on Feb. 26.