Reese Witherspoon stood up for a colleague over a pay equality issue.
The ‘Big Little Lies’ star "went to the mat" for one woman, who was receiving different pay to her male co-star.
She told the June issue of InStyle magazine: "I had a conversation last week that I never would have had seven years ago. It was about compensation: what a woman would make on a project versus what a guy in a similar position would make. I went to the mat for that woman. She’ll never know I made that call or had that conversation with the head of a studio. But I said to him, ‘This is the comp. This white guy over here is making this amount of money, and she’s done this, that, and the other with such success – and you’re asking for her to have a third of that. That’s not OK with me.’"
Reese previously revealed she is "passionate about women having their own money".
She said: "There are just reasons I’m passionate about a lot of things, you know? I think there’s a time and a place and there will be a moment when I can speak about it. But there’s a reason I’m very passionate about women having their own money. I have a lot of friends and I have a lot of personal experiences with women feeling afraid and making life choices because they felt completely paralysed or in a stasis because they didn’t know what to do financially. And you can’t have liberation if you don’t have that …
"The idea is to put women at the centre of the story. I was sick of making movies where I was the only female lead on the set. I was sick of seeing scripts where there was only one female role, badly written, and yet every actress in town wanted the part because there was nothing else."