Evan Rachel Wood ‘Just Now’ Receiving Pay Parity for ‘Westworld’ Season 3
Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores Abernathy is the magnificent heroine, regarded by many as the face of HBO’s Westworld.
Surprisingly, Wood told TheWrap that for the first two seasons of the hit show, her paycheck didn’t quite measure up to those of her male counterparts.
In a recent interview with Sharon Waxman, the founder and CEO of TheWrap, the actress revealed,
“I think I’m just now to the point where I’m getting paid the same as my male co-stars.”
With the second season of the successful show just premiering, Wood was told she was getting a raise for Season 3, now equal to the likes of Anthony Hopkins and Ed Harris – the leading men in Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s sci-fi drama.
Wood spoke about the new salary, saying:
“I was just told that, you know, ‘Hey you’re, you’re getting equal pay.’ And I was like [gasp]. And I almost got emotional. I was like, ‘I have never been paid the same as my male counterparts … Never, never.’”
“I found out … I’m always fighting for that, and I have turned down projects — “Westworld,” it’s like, I get it a little more. It’s like, ‘Well, you’re Anthony Hopkins or Ed Harris.’ But I think now we’re all doing equal amounts of work and really hard work.”
Wood states that up until now, she had been making “pretty much the same amount of money on things for years.”
“I have not moved. And I’m not saying I’m in like dire straits. I’m very lucky … It’s more about if you’re getting paid fairly, or the same, or if you’re getting paid less simply because you’re a woman, that’s not fair.”
“There’s a lot of politics, but there’s a lot of things that are now being talked about in a different way. There is a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes. There is a lot of trying to make things equal and trying to make things fair. I don’t know, there is a lot of stuff. But this is the first time that somebody made a point of being like, ‘Hey you’re getting this. And you deserve it.’ And that was nice.”
HBO boss Casey Bloys addressed the topic of pay parity following comments made by an exec, who said the bump in salaries the cast of Big Little Lies received for Season 2 “short of raped” the network.
“One of the things that’s come out of thinking about the movement and some conversations with Reese [Witherspoon], who’s really at the forefront, is something we’ve done recently. We’ve proactively gone through all of our shows — in fact, we just finished our process where we went through and made sure that there were no inappropriate disparities in pay; and where there were, if we found any, we corrected it going forward. And that’s is a direct result of the Time’s Up movement.”
“When you’re putting a show together, people come in with different levels of experience and maybe some people have won awards or something that makes them stand out. But when you get into Season 2 or 3 of a show and the show is a success, it is much harder to justify paying people wildly disparate numbers, and that’s where you have to make sure that you’re looking at the numbers — that they don’t end up just on the path they were on from the pilot stage. So, the thing that has been interesting about the whole movement is that it really is reminding everybody to do what’s right, and I think it’s retraining all of our thinking.”
Westworld premiered on April 22, and will air every Sunday at 9/8c on HBO.
Does the news about Evan Rachel Wood’s salary surprise you? And are you excited that Westworld will be seeing a Season 3? Let us know!
Source: TheWrap
