Chastain described a phenomenon where film studios would use whatever money was left over from her salary to add to a male actor’s pay, and said that she turned down “something huge” where she would not have been compensated equally.

“I remember afterwards I was like, ‘What did I do? Maybe it was a mistake.’ But it wasn’t, because everyone in the studio system heard what I did,” she said in the 2017 interview. “So what you’re doing is creating a reputation: don’t bring Jessica something where she’s not being fairly compensated compared to the male actor.”

2. Chastain also helped Octavia Spencer negotiate for higher pay

When Spencer told Chastain how much she was making for her film roles, she says Chastain “was quiet, and she said she had no idea that that’s what it was like for women of colour”. Chastain then negotiated higher pay for both herself and Spencer for the film they were working on together.

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“I love that woman, because she’s walking the walk and she’s actually talking the talk,” Spencer said at a Sundance Film Festival panel called “Women Breaking Barriers” in 2018. “She said, ‘Octavia, we’re gonna get you paid on this film. You and I are gonna be tied together. We’re gonna be favoured nations, and we’re gonna make the same thing.’ Fast forward to last week, we’re making five times what we asked for.”

3. Michelle Williams said she felt “paralysed” after learning that her co-star Mark Wahlberg had been paid significantly more

Williams took the fight for equal pay to Capitol Hill, where she spoke at an event marking Equal Pay Day and celebrating the passage of the pay cheque Fairness Act in 2019.

“In late 2017, the news broke that I’d been paid less than US$1,000 compared to the US$1.5 million that my male counterpart had received for the exact same amount of work,” she said in a speech. “And guess what, no one cared. This came as no surprise to me, it simply reinforced my life-learned belief that equality is not an inalienable right and that women would always be working just as hard for less money while shouldering more responsibility at home.”

Williams credited Chastain for amplifying the pay disparity, saying, “she wasn’t afraid to pick up a megaphone” and be heard.

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She continued, “On the job I just completed two weeks ago, I have to tell you, I was paid equally with my male co-star.”

4. Patricia Arquette told The Daily Beast that she’s still offered less for her work than men

Even after Patricia Arquette’s viral Oscars acceptance speech, in which she called out the US’ gender pay gap, she told The Daily Beast that she’s still offered less for her work than men.

Arquette’s 2015 Oscars acceptance speech galvanised women everywhere to demand equal pay.

“To every woman who gave birth, to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights, it’s our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America,” she said to thunderous applause.

She took her activism to Capitol Hill as well. In 2016, Arquette marked Equal Pay Day with US representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) by highlighting the results of a congressional report that found women make US$10,800 less per year than men. She also testified in front of the House Judiciary Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Subcommittee about the Equal Rights Amendment in 2019.

Still, Arquette finds herself fighting for equal pay in her acting work, telling The Daily Beast in 2018 that she’s “walked away from several jobs” because she was offered different deals from her male co-stars.

5. Charlize Theron negotiated a reported US$10 million pay cheque for The Huntsman, the same as her co-star Chris Hemsworth

After hacked Sony emails revealed pay disparities in Hollywood in 2014, Theron fought for equal pay for her work in the sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman.

“I have to give them credit because once I asked, they said yes,” she told Elle UK. “They did not fight it. And maybe that’s the message: that we just need to put our foot down. This is a good time for us to bring this to a place of fairness, and girls need to know that being a feminist is a good thing. It doesn’t mean that you hate men. It means equal rights. If you’re doing the same job, you should be compensated and treated in the same way.”

6. Robin Wright asked to be paid the same as co-star Kevin Spacey on Netflix’s House of Cards

Wright was reportedly earning US$420,000 per episode of House of Cards to Spacey’s US$500,000 before she asked for equal pay. She told executives, “You better pay me or I’m going to go public.”

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“It was a perfect paradigm,” she told audiences at a 2016 event at the Rockefeller Foundation. “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.”

7. Jennifer Lawrence wrote about her experience with Hollywood’s gender pay gap

The Hunger Games star wrote a 2015 essay entitled “Why Do I Make Less Than My Co-Stars?” in Lena Dunham’s Lenny newsletter. When Sony Pictures was hacked in 2014, emails showed that Lawrence and her American Hustle co-star Amy Adams had made less than their male co-stars Jeremy Renner, Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper.

“I didn’t want to seem ‘difficult’ or ‘spoiled,’” Lawrence wrote. “At the time, that seemed like a fine idea, until I saw the payroll on the internet and realised every man I was working with definitely didn’t worry about being ‘difficult’ or ‘spoiled’.”

Now she fights for equal pay. “I feel I know my worth, and I feel like I work to keep it that way,” she told 60 Minutes in 2018.

8. It took three seasons of The X-Files before Gillian Anderson was paid the same as co-star David Duchovny

When The X-Files originally aired from 1993, the studio made Anderson stand behind Duchovny on camera so that they wouldn’t appear side-by-side, she told The Daily Beast. Anderson also told The Hollywood Reporter that when The X-Files was revived in 2016, she was initially offered half of Duchovny’s pay.

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“I’m surprised that more [interviewers] haven’t brought that up because it’s the truth,” Anderson told The Daily Beast. “Especially in this climate of women talking about the reality of [unequal pay] in this business, I think it’s important that it gets heard and voiced. It was shocking to me, given all the work that I had done in the past to get us to be paid fairly. I worked really hard toward that and finally got somewhere with it.”

“Even in interviews in the last few years, people have said to me, ‘I can’t believe that happened, how did you feel about it, that is insane.’ And my response always was, ‘That was then, this is now.’ And then it happened again! I don’t even know what to say about it.”

Her fight paid off in the end. She eventually took home the same amount as Duchovny for the new episodes of the show, sources told the Daily Beast in 2017.

9. Chadwick Boseman donated part of his salary to ensure that 21 Bridges co-star Sienna Miller would be paid fairly

Miller revealed Boseman’s act after his death in an issue of Empire magazine dedicated to his memory.

“This was a pretty big budget film, and I know that everybody understands the pay disparity in Hollywood, but I asked for a number that the studio wouldn’t get to,” Miller said. “And because I was hesitant to go back to work and my daughter was starting school and it was an inconvenient time, I said, ‘I’ll do it if I’m compensated in the right way.’ Chadwick ended up donating some of his salary to get me to the number that I had asked for. He said that that was what I deserved to be paid.”

Miller had previously turned down a role on Broadway when she was offered less than half of what her male co-star would have made.

10. Claire Foy played Queen Elizabeth in The Crown, but was paid less than her co-star Matt Smith

She called the revelation “embarrassing” and was eventually paid more. Producers of The Crown revealed on a 2018 panel that Claire Foy made less than Matt Smith due to Smith’s fame from Doctor Who, reports Variety. Foy made about US$40,000 per episode out of the US$7 million-per-episode budget.

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“I certainly won’t be naive about those things,” Foy said at CinemaCon in 2018. “It’s really opened my eyes about what I am allowed to have an opinion about, and what I’m allowed to stand up for myself about. And I think that’s really changed my approach to myself and other women in this industry. It’s been only a positive thing – even though, embarrassing.”

Left Bank Pictures, which was responsible for budgeting and salaries for The Crown, issued an apology, and after the fallout, Foy reportedly received more than US$275,000 in back pay.

In a statement, Left Bank said, “We are absolutely united with the fight for fair pay, free of gender bias and for a rebalancing of the industry’s treatment of women in front of the camera and behind the scenes.”