The she-wolves of Wall Street are on the prowl in ‘Equity’
In Anna Gunn’s high-finance world, greed is good
In Equity, Anna Gunn NEW YORK gets her very own “I drink your milkshake!” moment. That iconic line comes from
There Will Be Blood as oil tycoon Daniel Plainview (Daniel DayLewis) tempestuously berates a rival. Gunn’s volcanic outburst is similarly treat-based, but it arrives amid a financial meltdown as investment banker Naomi Bishop (Gunn) discovers that her male colleagues are eating cookies teeming with chocolate chips.
“The cookies on that plate are oozing with chocolate, but mine only has three (expletive) chips!” Naomi roars in a scene that screenwriter Amy Fox lifted from a real-life incident she learned about while researching the Wall Street drama (in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles, expands nationwide throughout August).
“When I heard that it really happened, I thought, ‘Ah, I love it even more,’ ” says Gunn, sitting with the film’s director, Meera Menon. After taking a hot new social network public only to have it sabotaged by rumors of a security breach, “everything continues to fall apart for Naomi until finally, the anger and frustration gets put into that metaphor. It’s just so great.”
For Gunn, who played Walter White’s polarizing wife, Skyler, for five seasons of AMC’s Break
ing Bad, “it was wonderful to take on a character who was strong in her own right and not a reactor to a man,” she says. Throughout the film, Naomi is badgered by an at- torney (Alysia Reiner) investigating securities fraud and competes with a junior executive (Sarah Megan Thomas) whom she mentored. “She thinks she’s untouchable” but eventually starts to question: “What is this that I’ve been chasing? Is this really what I want my life to be?” Like the sleazy protagonists of
Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street, the women of Equity are well-heeled, cutthroat and unabashedly driven by greed (a point underscored early on when Naomi declares, “I like money”). But the film also shows the everyday struggles women face in the workplace, from being undermined by their male superiors to striking that balance between aggressive and agreeable in negotiating deals.
“You’re riding that very fine line between being perceived as too tough or too soft or too weak, and trying to find a middle ground,” Gunn says. “But you also use those things to your advantage as a woman, so you learn what works well in a room full of 30 men.”
They’re challenges that women face in the film industry, too, which has come under fire for a lack of representation in front of and behind the cameras. (Women accounted for only 9% of directors and 22% of movie protagonists in 2015, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film.) But Menon is optimistic about the strides women have made. (Co-stars Reiner and Thomas, for example, developed and produced Equity through their own company, Broad Street Pictures.)
“It’s an exciting time to be filmmakers in a world where the technology is accessible and you can be an empowered content creator,” Menon says. “There’s no reason to not be taking that initiative.”