Flickr/Gage
Skidmore
Stone’s experience is the exception, not the rule.
It’s
2017, but it took a movie about a 1973 tennis match to spark yet
another conversation about the gender pay gap in Hollywood.
Speaking
to tennis champion and feminist idol Billie Jean King and fellow
actress Andrea Riseborough in Out Magazine about her new film “Battle
of the Sexes,” actress Emma Stone opened up about the men who have
reduced their pay grade to promote equal pay.
“In
my career so far, I’ve needed my male co-stars to take a pay cut so
that I may have parity with them,” Stone said in
the interview. “If my male co-star, who has a higher quote than me
but believes we are equal, takes a pay cut so that I can match him,
that changes my quote in the future and changes my life.”
Riseborough,
Stone’s “Battle of the Sexes” female co-star, had a different
perspective, however.
“I
don’t know how many films I’ve been in—20, 25 films, something
like that,” she said, “And I’ve never had the experience of a
guy taking any sort of pay cut. In fact, I’ve been number 1 in
films before and been paid a lot less.”
Overall,
female actresses are drastically underpaid. In 2016, top grossing
male actor, Dwayne
“The Rock” Johnson earned
$64 million, well above top-grossing female actress, Jennifer
Lawrence at
$46 million.
The
top 10 female actresses, together, brought in just over $200 million
last year — certainly a hefty sum of money.
The
top 10 men? Over $450 million.
Not
only are women underpaid in film, they are also often oversexualized.
According to a USC-Annenberg study, taking place between 2007 and
2012, 26.2% of female actors in the top 500 films were shown
partially naked, compared to just 9.4% of men.
“Battle
of the Sexes” flips the script on this narrative. The movie
dramatizes a much-feted tennis match between female pro Billie Jean
King and Bobby Riggs, a retired, chauvinistic tennis player twenty
years her elder.
King
won the match, and the begrudging respect of the male-centric sports
world, in a televised broadcast watched by an estimated
90 million people.
King
also struggled with her sexual orientation, and was publicly outed as
a lesbian eight years later — a major through-line in the movie,
slated for release this September.
Image:
Flickr/Gage Skidmore
“I
just hope [the film] helps somebody out there who is struggling,”
King said in the Out interview. “But most important to me, I hope
this film will tell people to be their authentic selves.”
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