Sienna Miller says a Broadway producer once told her to “fuck off” over an equal pay dispute
Sienna Miller says the disagreement sparked after she was "offered less than half" of what a male costar would earn in a week for the show.
Aux News Sienna Miller
Years in the spotlight mean Sienna Miller is no stranger to the callousness of the industry—and the devaluation of her work. In a new interview with British Vogue, the Anatomy Of A Scandal star recalls coming to blows with a Broadway producer several years ago over unequal pay. Per Miller, she was “offered less than half” of what a male co-star would earn each week on the production.
“I said to the producer, who was extremely powerful, it’s not about money—it’s about fairness and respect, thinking they’d come back and say, ‘Of course, of course,’” Miller recalls.
The producer’s reaction wasn’t so understanding—instead, Miller shares, they just said “Well fuck off then.” The show went on, but Miller won’t name any names, insisting she doesn’t want to “be mean.”
Although Miller refrains from specifying exactly which Broadway production was home to the unsavory incident, two main contenders come to mind. After all, Miller has starred in two Broadway shows over her career: 2009's After Miss Julie, which she led opposite Jonny Lee Miller, and a 2015 Cabaret revival. In Cabaret, Miller replaced Michelle Williams in the role of Sally Bowles— her other co-stars included Alan Cumming, Danny Burstein, and Bill Heck.
Miller says that, although she initially “felt terrible about myself and embarrassed,” the dispute proved to be a “pivotal moment” in her career. It’s the first time she cites realizing “I had every right to be equally subsidized for the work that I would have done.”
As time goes on, Miller says she’s recognizing some real change. For one, Miller has since worked with co-stars singing a very different song. Miller recalls that the late Chadwick Boseman reallocated some of his salary from their 2019 film 21 Bridges to guarantee Miller received equal pay.
Miller says she told the Black Panther star back then, “What you did was extraordinary and meant the world.” One filming concluded, Miller says Boseman assured her: “You got paid what you deserved.”
Things aren’t only changing for Miller, however—at least, she doesn’t see it that way. Per Miller, performers who are “ten years younger have the word ‘No’ in their language in a way that I didn’t.”
“[Now] if you say, ‘I don’t feel comfortable’ in front of any form of executive, they’re shitting their pants,” Miller muses. “You’re included in a conversation about your level of comfort. It’s changed everything.”
19 Comments
Seems bad
Why wouldn’t her agent be handling that? They’ve already done such a stellar job with her career, after all
Requests and demands are a lot more powerful coming from the actor directly for a number of reasons. Also a lot of agents have a “well that’s just how it works” attitude.
If the actor has more “bargaining power” than his/her agent, then what good is an agent for except as a salary leech? I’d rather hire an actual lawyer to negotiate my compensation.
Agents do a lot of work other than negotiate (selling you, finding projects, etc). But even within negotiations and contracts they’ll sort most of details, allowing the star’s in person requests carry more weight.
I find the stories of male actors deliberately cutting their salaries to guarantee equal pay for their female co leads somewhat heartening, but also tinged with that “Teachers pool sick days to donate to fellow teacher who has cancer” vibe. This is an easily solvable problem, and it doesn’t require nor should it rely on the good nature of other people. Just fix the problem at the top
I don’t know if it really is easily solvable unless your solution is studios increase their budgets for cast salaries across the board so everyone gets paid more (which is an unrealistic expectation given studios are still for-profit businesses).Actors aren’t salaried employees on pay bands – they’re paid based on their celebrity status as much as their experience and their contracts are negotiated by third-party agents whose agenda is entirely to get the most for their clients. Some of them truly deserve to be paid top dollar because they’re by far the main draw in the movies they headline.So to me seems really tricky. Open to hear your idea of how to solve it though.
Actors belong to unions, and the two biggest ones in America actually have a decent amount of power, certainly more than enough to see through the sort of structural change necessary to guarantee pay equity, if they had the political will to do so. The fact that they don’t have the will is not an impediment to how simple the solution is: Pay less for celebrity. There are other ways to compensate people anyway, several of which have been long been utilized. The best recent example of this is Top Gun: Maverick, which Tom Cruise reportedly got paid $20 million for, but his total compensation was $100 million based on profits. Make it so that anyone who shares 80% of screen time gets no less than 90% of the lead, and anyone who shares 30% screen time makes no less than 70% of the lead. Now Cruise only gets $5 million for acting, compared to Connelly, Teller, and co getting $3.5 (about what they reportedly earned), and Cruise still get a huge payday for his name.
The obstacles you raise are not in place because of some inherent quality that makes them good or correct. Just like the problem of people in America going bankrupt because they have cancer or some other terrible disease, it’s not because we don’t know how to fix it. The solution is simple, and already implemented in dozens of other countries. It’s just that nobody actually wants to fix it, or at least not enough of the people with the power to do so want to.
IMO that is not a simple proposal at all. For one, no one is going to accept arbitrary percentages like that – they would want the percentages to make reasonable sense and not seem like they got picked out of thin air. I run a fantasy football league (with zero buy-in so it’s just for fun) and propose simple rule changes and that triggers 200+ e-mail chains of debates. And I’m not messing with someone’s salary…Two, actors who think they should be paid equally to someone else aren’t going to be happy if their base wages are the same but their costars are getting super-lucarative points that they aren’t…that is still pay disparity.
Haha, what? They are arbitrary percentages picked out of thin air. Did you think I’m lead negotiator here? Nobody’s paying me to come up with this shit, so I just made up example numbers. Why would you believe that my argument hinged on specific numbers?
Any numbers proposed would seem arbitrary and cause arguments – that was my point. Some people will feel slighted no matter what is proposed. And, like I said with my second point, people aren’t going to ignore the variable pay that stars get.And I guess as a third point, if we go with your system, what’s to stop a studio from paying Cruise $5m as the lead star and ScarJo $4m for a different movie as the lead star? Even if the actors on the respective movies get paid proportionally, there is still a disparity. The only simple thing that could be done is making all salaries / contracts public. Actors will have more info to act on.
Actors and actresses are paid based on the fact that they can only do a limited number of projects each year. Those is demand benefit from something like a bidding war. If a producer or studio really wants Robert Downey or Julia Roberts, they have to either have a movie so interesting that the actors can not resist or they have to pay more than the dozens of other projects that would like them to star.Though it may be rooted to some extent in celebrity, it is really more that some people are more in demand than others. For example, if Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep or Jennifer Lawrence’s name is on the marquee, it will get the film attention and help put butts in the seats, while Hailee Steinfeld, Seinna Miller or Allison Janney may be just as talented, whether or not they are in the cast isn’t going to make or break most films, so the bidding war for their services will not go as high.I haven’t clicked the link. My assumption is that when the producer told her to fuck-off, Ms. Miller did and did not do the play, but it we were to go along with the idea that she did not walk and still did play… I’d say that even if she had to do everything backwards and in heels, Alan Cummings is worth more at the box office than Sienna Miller. More people will go to a play simply because he is in it and for that reason any play which would like him to star will have to pay more than the other shows which would also like him to perform.
“Actors aren’t salaried employees on pay bands – they’re paid based on their celebrity status as much as their experience and their contracts are negotiated by third-party agents whose agenda is entirely to get the most for their clients. Some of them truly deserve to be paid top dollar because they’re by far the main draw in the movies they headline.”True but on the other hand, you still have people trying things like this:https://www.thedailybeast.com/gillian-anderson-i-was-offered-half-duchovnys-pay-for-the-x-files-revivalSeason 1 back in the 1990s, sure for the reasons you stated and also described in the article. The return of the show many decades later when circumstances are quite different? Well … that just seems like a bit much putting it a lot nicer than it actually deserves!
Yea I mean not saying it’s right, but companies are always going to try to lowball and offer the least they can to people. The way to combat it is to make salaries and compensation public so companies can’t misrepresent or lie about what they have paid someone else.
Everybody on the “talent” side of showbiz is grossly overpaid in the first place
This is absolutely true, but there’s limited options for fixing that problem that don’t result in even more grossly overpaid executives taking an even larger slice of the pie. I don’t think Cruise deserves more than a fraction of the $100m he got from the new Top Gun, but it’s a lot more complex of an action to make sure that the grips and VFX artists get that money if you direct it away from him, instead of it going directly into Jerry Bruckheimer’s pocket.
Ms Miller’s refusal/reluctance to name the producer who did this to her (she will in her memoir, won’t she?) is the same situation with people and sexual predators they have met but refuse to name. The rapists/criminals/predators have and will continue this behavior until they’re cancelled/imprisoned, if at all.
is the same situation with people and sexual predators they have met but refuse to name. Or, it’s not remotely the same, at all.
She did not deserve to get paid as much as Boseman.