Foy paid less than Smith for The Crown
The makers of The Crown have admitted that Claire Foy was paid less for her starring role than the actor who played her husband. Despite winning a Golden Globe for her performance, Foy’s salary was lower than that of Matt Smith, who played the young Duke of Edinburgh. The makers of the Netflix drama, speaking at a television conference in Jerusalem yesterday, claimed Smith was paid more because he was better known when the series was cast. He had already found international fame as Doctor Who.
EVEN the Queen is on the wrong side of the gender pay gap, it seems. The makers of The Crown have admitted that Claire Foy was paid less for her starring role than the actor who played her husband.
Despite winning a Golden Globe for her performance, Foy’s salary was lower than that of Matt Smith as the young Duke of Edinburgh.
The makers of the Netflix drama, speaking at a television conference in Jerusalem yesterday, claimed Smith was paid more because he was better known when the series was cast.
He had found international fame as Doctor Who, whereas Foy had appeared in acclaimed but lower profile British dramas including the BBC’S Wolf Hall and Little Dorrit. “Going forward, no one gets paid more than the Queen,” said Suzanne Mackie, one of the show’s British producers.
However, that will not help Foy, as she and Smith have completed their two series of the drama. The Crown has been recast and the Queen will be played by Olivia Colman in series three.
According to reports, Foy was paid $40,000 (£29,000) per episode – a figure dwarfed by the salary of other television stars.
Lena Headey, the British actress, earned an estimated $500,000 (£358,000) per episode for Game of Thrones, according to trade magazine Variety. Smith’s salary for The Crown has not been disclosed.
Mackie and Andy Harries, her fellow producer, said each episode of the first two seasons cost around $7 million (£5 million).
“We put that money on the screen,” Harries said, pointing to the 120 costumes
‘I have more debt than when I was 16. I live beyond my means. My Ocado shops are off the scale’
worn by Foy in series two. In an interview last year with The Daily Telegraph, Foy, 33, said appearing in The Crown had not made her rich.
“I have more debt than when I was 16,” she said, joking: “I live beyond my means. My Ocado shops are off the scale.” She spoke of wanting a six-bedroom house on Hampstead Heath “but unless I have, like, £8.9million, that’s never going to happen.”
At the time she shared a terraced house in north London with Stephen Campbell Moore, her husband. They recently announced their separation.
Actors’ gender pay disparities were thrown into sharp relief when Michelle Williams and Mark Wahlberg re-shot scenes from All The Money In The World, Ridley Scott’s dramatisation of the Paul Getty kidnapping case, following Kevin Spacey’s departure from the cast.
Wahlberg was paid $1.5 million (£1million) to return to the set – Williams was paid just $1,000 (£716). Following an outcry, Wahlberg donated his fee to the Time’s Up campaign.
Last week, Susan Sarandon revealed that Paul Newman, her co-star in Twilight, the 1998 film, gave her part of his salary after hearing that she was paid less than him despite sharing the top of the bill. “He was a gem,” she said.
Appearing in The Crown turned Foy into a star, and has propelled her to Hollywood.
She is to star as Lisbeth Salander in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, based on the novel by Stieg Larsson. She has also signed up to play Janet Armstrong, wife of
Neil Armstrong, in First Man.
The third season of The Crown will introduce the Duchess of Cornwall and Diana, Princess of Wales, as young women.
“Those are going to be extraordinary, those episodes,” Mackie said. She added that when the drama reaches the present day, Meghan Markle “can play herself ”.