Jennifer Lawrence ‘Punished’ for Standing up to Director

Jennifer Lawrence is tired of the way Hollywood treats women. She says that even though women are mistreated in all industries, she understands why more don’t stand up for themselves — because she says she, too, has been “punished” for it.

“The entertainment industry is kind of the stage on which you can see the inner workings of problems that are all over the world,” Lawrence told The Hollywood Reporter in the magazine’s annual Actress Roundtable. “If a flight attendant comes forward about a pilot, it doesn’t end up in the news because nobody knows about it. That doesn’t mean that there’s less sexual abuse going on anywhere else in the world, in any other place of work. But fortunately, we’re starting the conversation now.”

Though she’s currently the highest-paid actress in the business, she started a discussion about wage inequality in a Lenny letter after a Sony hack revealed she and Amy Adams made less than their American Hustle male co-stars. She says since opening up that line of dialogue, it’s easier for her to negotiate equal pay for herself.

“It’s much easier for me now to be paid fairly. The reason I spoke out about it was really — we’re in the industry, everybody is looking at us, if we’re going through this, every woman in the world is going through this. But the real problem is the normalization of it. It’s the reason why your agents don’t think twice about paying you a third of your [co-star’s salary] because it’s been so normalized for so long,” she said.

However, the Oscar winner says it wasn’t easy getting there. She told THR about an instance of sexism she received on set during the days she was fighting for equal pay.

“I’ve had this happen: I finally made the decision to stand up for myself, and then 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,’ and then I was punished, and I got afraid that I wasn’t going to be hired again,” she said.

Without naming the director in question, she recalled, “I was called ‘difficult’ and a ‘nightmare.’ “

The 27-year-old said that if she, as the highest-paid actress in Hollywood, was afraid she’d never work again, she sees why everyday women don’t speak out.

“I think a lot of people aren’t coming forward because they’re afraid they’re not going to work again. You need to be able to say, ‘This is wrong,’ and have somebody do something about it, instead of saying, ‘Oh, it’s wrong? Well, you’re fired,’ ” she said.

In the end, Lawrence hopes that “eventually” the culture will change. “I think it’s going to be a while. It’s deeply ingrained, unfortunately. It’s kind of this social proof in some way of your masculinity,” she added.