Robin Wright is ready to talk. The actor and Emmy nominee recently spoke out about how she was treated by Netflix during the years she starred in Hou
Robin Wright is ready to talk. The actor and Emmy nominee recently spoke out about how she was treated by Netflix during the years she starred in House of Cards, one of the platform’s first major original series. Speaking at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival, Wright said that even though her character, Claire Underwood, was the show’s second lead, she was never awarded the same compensation as her costar Kevin Spacey.
“Yes, it was difficult. I am going to be honest,” Wright said. “When I said, ‘I think it’s only fair because my character became as popular as [Spacey’s],’ they said, ‘We can’t pay you the same as an actor, so we will make you executive producer and you can direct. We will give you three different paychecks.’ I asked, ‘Why can’t you pay me as an actor?’ ‘Because you didn’t win an Academy Award.’” At the time Spacey had won two Oscar statuettes: the first in 1995 for The Usual Suspects, and the second in 2000, for American Beauty.
“That has been the protocol for years—it just is,” Wright continued. “If you say, ‘Why did so-and-so female not get the same amount as Will Smith?’ they say, ‘It will increase after you win.’ Nomination, not so much. Why does it have anything to do with a raise?” Wright may have ultimately come out on top, though: Spacey was fired from the show in 2017, leaving Wright to star solo in its final season. A judge later ordered Spacey to pay nearly $31 million to the show’s producers, though that amount was subsequently reduced to just $1 million.
In a previous interview with Marie Claire Australia, Wright recounted how she leveraged Claire Underwood’s popularity to get a contract renegotiation. “I was like, ‘I want to be paid the same as Kevin,’” Wright told the publication. “It was the perfect paradigm. There are very few films or TV shows where the male, the patriarch, and the matriarch are equal. And they are in House of Cards. I was looking at the statistics, and Claire Underwood’s character was more popular than [Frank’s] for a period of time. So I capitalized on it. I was like, ‘You better pay me or I’m going to go public.’ And they did.” It’s a negotiating tactic that would make Claire Underwood proud.
Original story in VF Italia.
COMMENTS