WASHINGTON — She didn’t want to be called a spoiled brat.
So mega-star and Academy-Award winner Jennifer Lawrence, now 25, didn’t play hardball when negotiating pay for her starring role in the film, “American Hustle” in 2013.
“(Co-stars) Jeremy Renner, Christian Bale, and Bradley Cooper all fought and succeeded in negotiating powerful deals for themselves,” Lawrence wrote in Lenny, the new e-newsletter by actress-writer Lena Dunham. “If anything, I’m sure they were commended for being fierce and tactical, while I was busy worrying about coming across as a brat and not getting my fair share.”
When the massive hack and dump of Sony emails went viral last year, however, she not only found out that her male co-stars made much more than her in that film, but that the producers called another lead actress (Angelina Jolie) “a spoiled brat.”
“For some reason, I just can’t picture someone saying that about a man,” Lawrence wrote.
Lawrence, who won a supporting actress Golden Globe for “American Hustle,” acknowledges that her case might not be “relatable” to average women — as one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood today, she made an estimated $52 million last year — but her remarks evoke the ongoing debate about the gap in pay between men and woman in many professions, across the country. But, as The Washington Post points out, she isn’t the only young female actress who feels she has been hustled out of equal pay because of her gender.
