Robin Wright demanded she be paid the same amount of money for working on “House of Cards” as her co-star Kevin Spacey - and she got it!
The actress explained her negotiation tactics during a discussion Tuesday about human rights and equality for the Rockefeller Foundation’s “Insight Dialogues” series in New York City.
“I was like, ‘I want to be paid the same as Kevin,” Wright said she told her bosses at the Netflix series. “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,” she continued. “So I capitalized on it. I was like, ‘You better pay me or I’m going to go public.’... And they did.”
On the 2015 Forbes list of the World’s Highest-Paid TV Actresses, Wright came in at No. 14, earning $5.5 million for “House of Cards,” which is about $423,000 per show for a 13-episode season. This was the 50-year-old’s first time making the list.
However, in 2014, it was reported that Spacey was making $500,000 per episode of the successful series and that that figure would soon rise to possibly as much as $1 million per show.
It is unclear how much Wright and Spacey are equally making this year.
In addition to acting on “House of Cards,” Wright is also a producer of the series and has directed several episodes. The Emmy-winning series will return to Netflix for a fifth season sometime in 2017.
Wright joins a growing list of actresses who are speaking up on equal pay in Hollywood, including Patricia Arquette, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lawrence, who wrote a very candid essay on the subject last year for the Lenny Letter titled “Why Do I Make Less Than My Male Co-Stars?”
