Like many a famous actress, Priyanka Chopra has a bone to pick with the film industry—both in the U.S. and abroad. “I don‘t like the fact that I get paid much less than the boys . . . I don‘t like the fact that the disparity is so massive,” she tells the BBC.
The Quantico star “doesn’t like getting paid less than the
boys,” she says in a BBC interview.
Like many a famous actress, Priyanka Chopra has a bone to pick with the film industry—both in the U.S. and abroad. “I don‘t like the fact that I get paid much less than the boys . . . I don‘t like the fact that the disparity is so massive,” she tells the BBC.
There’s a notoriously wide pay gap between actors and actresses—as there is among men and women in many other industries as well. Stars like Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams have publicly addressed the issue in open letters and interviews; Natalie Portman recently chimed in as well, revealing that back in 2011, Ashton Kutcher was paid three times her salary for the rom-com No Strings Attached. “I wasn’t as pissed as I should have been,” the Oscar winner told Marie Claire UK. “I mean, we get paid a lot, so it‘s hard to complain, but the disparity is crazy . . . Compared to men, in most professions, women make 80 cents to the dollar. In Hollywood, we are making 30 cents to the dollar.”
To Chopra, a Bollywood star who broke out on American soil when she began headlining ABC’s Quantico, the main issue is that female stars aren’t viewed as heroes in the same way that male stars are. In Bollywood, male-led films tend to earn more at the box office than films with female leads, a fact reflected in each type of actor’s salary, she claims. She cites an example of a male-led film making $40 million at the box office, while a female-led film would make $10 million. “When the audience is ready to watch a female-led film with a woman on a poster and make it into a $40 million dollar film, we will get paid for it,” she said.
Of course, audiences have shown they want female-led films, at least in the U.S.—but Hollywood just isn‘t always paying attention. Female-led films do well at the box office (Mad Max: Fury Road, the Pitch Perfect franchise, for example)—but not enough of them are being made. Even top stars struggle just to get what they deserve. Lawrence and Adams, for example, were paid much less than their American Hustle co-stars, despite being eminently bankable actresses with truckloads of critical acclaim and box-office reputations equivalent to those of Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper.
Bollywood is similarly limiting, as Chopra notes. In 2015, Variety reported that top-tier actors can rake in about $4.5 million per picture, doubling that figure by adding on producer credits. By comparison, top-tier actresses, like Chopra and Deepika Padukone, only make about $1 million to 1.2 million per film, with no backend opportunities. Oh, how bleak and universal the wage gap can be.
In her BBC interview, Chopra also discussed the issue of whitewashing, saying that she is excited to usher in a new era of visibility. She also praised stars like Aziz Ansari and Mindy Kaling for what they do, noting how vital representation is. “Global entertainment needs to see representation of all kinds of races,” she said. “Diversity is the need of the hour.”
—Courtesy: Vanity Fair
