Marvel’s ‘Secret Invasion’ Star Olivia Colman Accuses Hollywood Of Paying Her Less Because She’s A Woman: “If I Was Oliver Colman, I’d Be Earning A F–K Of A Lot More Than I Am”
Spencer Baculi
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According to Secret Invasion star Olivia Colman, not only does gender pay gap still exist in Hollywood, but it is so severe that, at current, she is purportedly losing out “a f–k of a lot” of money compared to her male peers.
Colman, who appeared in the all-around-abysmal Marvel television series as Nick Fury’s MI6 confidant Sonya Falsworth, shared her opinion on the topic while making a recent guest appearance on CNN’s The Amanapour Hour to promote her newly-released film, Wicked Little Letters.
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Amidst a larger conversation about the project, itself a fictionalized account of a period during the 1920s when residents of Littlehampton, England were receiving a bevy of anonymously written and exceptionally crude letters, the actress was eventually asked by the show’s eponymous host Christiane Amanpour, “I wonder whether you see, in what you’ve done, not just from where you started, but where you are now, whether roles for women are beginning to be taken as seriously as they should because women – are they considered now big box office draws?”, to which Colman affirmed, “I would say yes.”
“And actually,” she continued, “I mean, research suggests that they’ve always been big box office draws, but they chosen to say – and don’t get me started on the pay dispartiy, but male actors get paid more because they used to say they draw in the audiences And actually ,that hasn’t been true for decades, but they still like to use that as a reason to not pay women as much as their male counterparts.”
Met with this assertion, Amanpour further inquired of Colman, “Do you have a pay disparity? I mean, you’re an Oscar winning actress?”
In turn, the Wonka actress asserted, “I’m very aware that if I was Oliver Colman, I”d be earning a lot more than I am.”
Closing out her time on the show with one final albeit vague anecdote to back up her claim, Colman ultimately added,”I’m aware of one pay disparity, which is a 12,000% difference. Yes! Do the maths. I know.”
Now, at this point, I’m sure many would expect a harsh rebuttal of Colman’s claim that a gender pay gap exists in Hollywood – Unfortunately, according to various studies undertaken in the last few years, such a gap objectively exists, no matter how much anyone, for whatever reason, wishes it didn’t.
However, to this end, it should be explicitly noted that while there does exist a pay gap between men and women in Hollywood, said research has also specifically called attention to the fact that this disparity is caused by a number of factors.
Even in attempting to argue that there existed significant “discrimination” against female actresses in regard to pay, Lancaster University’s Sofia Izquierdo Sanchez and Maria Navarro Paniagua admitted in their regularly-cited 2017 paper ‘Hollywood’s Wage Structure and Discrimination‘ that while base numbers imply that “females earn 56% less than males”, this gap “decreases when we include other [factors]” such as “actor characteristics” and “the qualitative characteristics of movies”, the wage gap falls to just 20%.
The pair also noted that additional elements such as age, experience, budgets, a project’s given genre, whether or not it’s a sequel (and if so, whether or not the actor is a returning or new cast member), and even its rating all play a role in determining a given actor’s pay.
Speaking specifically to the topic of “age and experience”, Sanchez and Paniagua found that while “female actors are significantly different from their male counterparts in our sample,” this is because “actresses are, on average, 6 years younger and have 4 fewer years of experience (experience is measured as number of years since first movie appearance).”
As such, “controlling for age and experience significantly reduces the gender gap coefficient from an original -2.180 to -1.538.”
“This difference in wages notably increases from 2 to 3 years of experience, but after 4 years it starts to converge,” they added. “Finally, actresses’ salaries overtake actors’, but from 17 years of experience wages are again higher for male than for female actors.”
And while the pair’s paper, as noted above, ultimately ends with its authors using its findings to support their claim of “gender discrimination in the industry”, it should be noted that, in their conclusion, they note that “a difference in compensation of 1.065 and 1.092 million dollar still exists between male and female actors after we account for actor and movie characteristics.”
Thus, while it may be easy to write off the gender pay gap as blatant discrimination – and that’s not to say sexist attitudes are never a factor in a female actor receiving reduced pay, as there are assuredly cases where they are – upon digging a bit deeper, it’s apparent that, like with most things in life, the answer is far more complicated than can be conveyed in a major media news network soundbite.
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