Fincher chose the former.
I was ecstatic. Here I was, about to be a bona fide star, with all the accouterments that came with the title. At least that’s what it looked like on the call sheet, where I was listed as the third principal actor in the cast. This was a huge role—the first in my big-screen repertoire in which I played a main character in a flick specifically geared toward a mainstream (read: white) audience. I am not suggesting for even a half a beat that this made the gig more important than the work I did in, say, Hustle & Flow or Baby Boy. But starring in a big-budget Hollywood film opposite box office draws such as Pitt and Blanchett was supposed to come with an entirely different set of possibilities: a bigger budget, a wider audience, more publicity, critical responses that could open more doors for me as an actress, and—glory!—a fatter paycheck. When the movie was released, most of this came to fruition, I’ll cop to that. But the last item never materialized.
After I got word that I’d received the part, my manager, Vince, settled down to the business of negotiating my pay and quickly crashed into a veritable concrete wall of “take it or leave it” negotiations that left me juggling the equivalent of sofa change compared with what my costars received.
Both Brad and Cate got millions. Me? With bated breath, I sat by the phone for hours, waiting for Vince to call and tell me the number that I thought would make me feel good: somewhere in the mid six figures—no doubt a mere percentage of what Brad was bringing home to Angelina and their beautiful babies, but something worthy of a solid up-and-coming actress with a decent amount of critical acclaim for her work. Alas, that request was dead on arrival. “I’m sorry, Taraji,” Vince said quietly when we finally connected. “They came in at the lowest of six figures. I convinced them to add in a little more, but that’s as high as they’d go.” There was one other thing: I’d have to agree to pay my own location fees while filming in New Orleans, meaning three months of hotel expenses would be coming directly out of my pocket. Insult, meet injury.
Much ado was made when Forbes’s 2015 annual list of the ten highest-paid actors and actresses hit newsstands, revealing the gross pay disparity between the genders. Collectively, the men stashed $431 million into their bank accounts, while the women pulled in $218 million—about half that of their male counterparts, even though the top-earning women were some movie-industry heavy hitters with blockbuster projects on the screen. Rather than uphold that pesky, long-held code of silence about what they get paid, actresses like Jennifer Lawrence, Patricia Arquette, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Reese Witherspoon set it off, with Jennifer leading the charge in an essay that had the entire blogosphere giving her virtual fist bumps for telling it like it is after getting wind of the Sony Pictures email hack that revealed she’d gotten millions less than her male American Hustle costars. In her piece, the Oscar-winning Hunger Games star blamed herself for “giving up” in her own negotiations out of fear that she’d be labeled “spoiled” or “difficult” for demanding equal pay. “I’m over trying to find the ‘adorable’ way to state my opinion and still be likable! I don’t think I’ve ever worked for a man in charge who spent time contemplating what angle he should use to have his voice heard,” she wrote. “It’s just heard.”
I understood and respected the messengers and especially their messages. There’s no reason that in the twenty-first century we should be having this discussion, but here we are, with women—not just us actresses, but all women, whether they run a Fortune 500 company or answer the phones at one—getting paid less than seventy cents for every dollar a man makes, even less if they’re women of color. But being a black woman in Hollywood comes with a unique set of challenges that can make comparisons of who made what according to gender feel like folly.