EVERY YEAR, THE Hollywood Reporter gathers together the heavy hitters from the film world for a series of roundtable interviews.
Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Chastain, Allison Janney, Mary J Blige and Emma Stone were chosen for this year’s Actress Roundtable, along with our own Saoirse Ronan.
The conversation was of course heavily centred on the current sexual assault discussion in Hollywood, which Ronan said she was ‘really lucky’ to be protected from.
“I never was really exposed to what went on at parties, I was never left on my own with anyone,” she said. “My mum and dad were always around.”
She mentioned the story of Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, the model who worked with the NYPD to secure a recording of Harvey Weinstein admitting to groping her:
What was incredible about it was that she was brave enough to go back the next day, because she knew that it was important for this to come out. The fact that she put herself in that position again, and made herself so vulnerable, and still nothing was done about it…
And that’s the really disappointing thing about all this, is that they’ve had all of this sh*t on all of these men and women for the last few years but they haven’t done anything about it. It’s just been swept under the carpet.
“The women need to know that there’s support here for them no matter what,” she continued.
Each of the women had lots to say on the subject of gender inequality in the film industry – Jennifer Lawrence told a story about being called ‘unruly’ for standing up to a bullying director:
I went to go to the bathroom at work and one of the producers stopped me and was like, “You know, we can hear you on the microphone, you’ve been really unruly.” Which was not true, but basically my job was threatened because the director said something f**ked up to me and I said, “That’s sick, you can’t talk to me like that.”
Jessica Chastain, meanwhile, shared a little about what goes on when actresses are negotiating contracts:
I don’t understand how an agent is OK with you making a third of your co-star’s salary. After Zero Dark Thirty, I was sent a lot of scripts where it was a female protagonist, but they wouldn’t do my deal until they knew who the male actor was because they needed to do his deal first and then see what was left over.
Read the rest of the revealing interview here.
