Ageing action heroes muscle out women in Hollywood pay list
World’s most valuable actress Emma Stone limps in as only 15th highest earner as men dominate
SHE IS the world’s highest-paid actress, but Emma Stone’s campaign to close the Hollywood gender pay gap has a long way to go.
A list of Tinseltown’s top earners has shown that Stone ranks only 15th, way behind some ageing action heroes.
The 28-year-old winner of this year’s best actress Oscar for La La Land earned $26million (£20million) in the year to June 2017, and has used her fame to press for greater equality.
A list published by Forbes magazine showed that 14 actors outstripped her, including Ryan Gosling, 36, her La La Land co-star. The highest-paid Hollywood star is Mark Wahlberg, 46, who earned $68 million (£53 million) over the same period.
Wahlberg’s films in the last year include Patriots Day, in which he plays a policeman on the trail of the Boston marathon bombers, and the blockbuster Transformers: The Last Knight.
Second in the list is Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock, 45, with earnings of $65 million (£50 million). Vin Diesel, 50, action hero and star of the Fast and Furious franchise, is next in line with $54.5 million (£42.5 million). Adam Sandler, 50, is fourth after renewing his lucrative deal with Netflix, and eternal action star Jackie Chan, 63, is fifth. The top 10 is completed by Robert Downey Jr, 52, Tom Cruise, 55, and three Bollywood stars: Shah Rukh Khan, 51, Salman Khan, 51, and Akshay Kumar, 49.
The top 10 actors banked a combined $488.5 million (£381 million), nearly three times the $172.5million (£134million) made by the top 10 women.
The pay disparity can be attributed to the dominance of action blockbusters and to a dearth of opportunities for older women. In the list of top 10 actresses, the oldest is Julia Roberts, 49. All but three of the male top 10 are aged 50 or over.
Natalie Robehmed, Forbes associate editor, said: “In release schedules dominated by superhero movies and brawny blockbusters, there are simply fewer parts for women that pay the sizeable back-end profits that result in leading men’s large paydays, or the franchise sequels that permit aggressive negotiation for favourable deals. Until there are an equal number of high-paying roles, there will continue to be an inequality in the pay cheques of Tinseltown’s very richest.”
Nineteen men earned $15 million (£11.7 million) or more in the past year, but only five women did so – Stone, Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Lawrence, Melissa Mccarthy and Mila Kunis. Stone disclosed recently that her male co-stars support her campaign.
“In my career I’ve needed my male co-stars to take a pay cut so that I may have parity with them,” she said. “And that’s something they do for me because they feel it’s what’s right and fair.”