{"id":68377,"date":"2025-05-02T12:30:08","date_gmt":"2025-05-02T12:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/68377\/"},"modified":"2025-05-02T12:30:08","modified_gmt":"2025-05-02T12:30:08","slug":"the-roles-jessica-chastain-always-turns-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/68377\/","title":{"rendered":"The roles Jessica Chastain always turns down"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Jessica<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ YouTube Still)<\/p>\n

Jessica Chastain<\/a> has\u00a0proven time and again\u00a0that she is one of the most versatile actors in Hollywood. The industry isn\u2019t known for providing stories about complex female characters, but Chastain has\u00a0managed to build\u00a0a career on almost exclusively complicated roles. She played a CIA analyst in Kathryn Bigelow\u2019s controversial thriller\u00a0Zero Dark Thirty, a violently inclined Lady Macbeth type in\u00a0A Most Violent Year, and a professional skier-turned-poker mogul in\u00a0Molly\u2019s Game.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to believe that she\u2019s only won one Oscar and been nominated for two others, but maybe she just makes it look too easy<\/a>. Whatever the reason, there is no denying that Chastain is one of the greatest actors of her generation, and a large part of that is her seeming fearlessness. She never shies away from playing unsympathetic characters and finds roles that cast challenging women as protagonists rather than marginalised villains. <\/p>\n

With this context, it\u2019s hard to imagine that she would ever definitively close the door on any type of role, but in a 2017 interview with Variety<\/a>, she set out clear boundaries, and they are directly in keeping with what you\u2019d expect of her. \u201cI\u2019m not taking jobs anymore where I\u2019m getting paid a quarter of what the male co-star is being paid,\u201d she revealed. \u201cI\u2019m not allowing that in my life.\u200b\u200b\u201d<\/p>\n

She recalled hearing Molly\u2019s Game and Spider-Man producer Amy Pascal saying that female actors are too grateful to ask for more money. When a job comes along, they don\u2019t question the salary they\u2019re being offered, they just feel lucky for the opportunity. Chastain said that early in her career, she wouldn\u2019t know how much she was going to get paid for a movie until the male star was cast and the executives knew how much money was left over. <\/p>\n

These days, she always starts by making sure the pay is equal. \u201cI ask what they\u2019re offering me in comparison to the guy,\u201d she explained. \u201cI don\u2019t care about how much I get paid; I\u2019m in an industry where we\u2019re overcompensated for the work we do. But I don\u2019t want to be on a set where I\u2019m doing the same work as someone else, and they\u2019re getting five times what I\u2019m getting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most people would agree that movie stars get paid a disproportionately high\u00a0amount of money\u00a0for their work. Leonardo DiCaprio got a $30million cheque for\u00a0Killers of the Flower Moon. Will Smith got $40m for\u00a0King Richard. And those are just the baseline salaries. Margot Robbie\u2019s baseline salary for\u00a0Barbie\u00a0was $12.5m, but due to its resounding commercial success, her take-home pay was a whopping $50m thanks to box office bonuses. Sandra Bullock reportedly took $70m to the bank for\u00a0Gravity.<\/p>\n

So yes, movie stars get paid a truck ton of money, and actors like Chastain don\u2019t need to be nickel-and-diming studio executives for financial security. However, the gender pay gap is just as egregious in Hollywood as it is in most of the rest of society. <\/p>\n

At the movie star level, there is an average wage gap of $2.4m<\/a>, and while there is absolutely no need to pity the women who earn a paltry $15m for a movie instead of the $17.4m that their male co-star earns, setting a high-profile example of demanding equal pay is admirable. Unlike most women, Chastain can afford to lose work for standing up for equal pay, and doing so can help put the issue back in the headlines and might even spark broader change.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n

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