Octavia Spencer and Jessica Chastain have been close friends since working on The Help – and now, Chastain has helped Spencer negotiate five times her initial salary for a new comedy.<\/p>\n
They were discussing the film, produced by Chastain, when Spencer revealed she is paid less as a woman of colour.<\/p>\n
“Octavia – we’re going to get you paid on this film,” Chastain told her.<\/p>\n
She then fixed it so that both women would earn the same. Spencer said of Chastain: “She’s walking the walk.”<\/p>\n
She was talking at the Women Breaking Barriers panel at the Sundance Film Festival on Wednesday when she revealed how the project came about – and how the pay conversation came up.<\/p>\n
Spencer, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for 2011’s The Help, makes her comments at about 19 minutes and 30 seconds into this clip.<\/p>\n
“We’re really good friends and we had a great time working on The Help,” explained Spencer, who’s just been nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for The Shape of Water.<\/p>\n
She is the first woman to follow an Oscar win with nominations in two consecutive years.<\/p>\n
“She wants to do comedies, and I want to break out of period pieces. I love them, they’ve been good to me, but I want to play someone who resembles me in some fashion.”<\/p>\n
They were talking about the importance of pay equity between men and women when Spencer told Chastain: “Here’s the thing. Women of colour on that spectrum, we make far less than white women.<\/p>\n
“So if we’re going to have that conversation, we’ve got to bring the women of colour to the table.”<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Octavia Spencer and Jessica Chastain have been close friends since working on The Help – and now, Chastain has helped Spencer negotiate five times her initial salary for a new comedy. They were discussing the film, produced by Chastain, when Spencer revealed she is paid less as a woman of colour. “Octavia – we’re going […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":395748,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[137],"tags":[16550,16551],"yoast_head":"\n