There is reportedly a huge pay gap between the actors in HBO’ “The Last of Us”

(Read More Here). There is reportedly a huge pay gap between the actors in HBO’ “The Last of Us”. 

According to Variety, Pedro Pascal received $600,000 per episode, while Bella Ramsey received $70,000, despite both being the protagonists of the series.

Bloys credited Witherspoon, a founding member of Time’s Up, with being “really at the forefront” of the movement and the conversations it’s inspired—both in Hollywood and at HBO specifically. As Bloys explained, “We just finished our process, where we went through and made sure that there were no inappropriate disparities in pay; and where there were, if we found any, we corrected it going forward. And that’s a direct result of the Time’s Up movement.”

“One of the things that’s come out of thinking about the movement and some conversations with Reese, who’s really at the forefront, is something we’ve done recently,” HBO’s president of programming, Casey Bloys, told The Hollywood Reporter. “We’ve proactively gone through all of our shows — in fact, we just finished our process where we went through and made sure that there were no inappropriate disparities in pay; and where there were, if we found any, we corrected it going forward.”

She’s an outspoken leader of the Time’s Up movement, which established a legal fund for women who face sexual harassment in the entertainment industry, and she brought Big Little Lies to HBO. That show cemented a fact women already knew but the industry was struggling to acknowledge: that female-driven shows with strong casts of women can be just as successful as shows with leading men. And Witherspoon’s involvement in that show and in Time’s Up lead to this — a huge moment for women in entertainment who have been fighting for fair treatment and now will receive equal pay on HBO shows. 

As for how, exactly, the adjustments worked, Bloys was a little more willing to provide details. The process was not simply a matter of paying women and men identical salaries; instead, it was about looking for actors who, for example, had less experience when they signed on to a series, and therefore might not have been paid as much as the more seasoned co-stars. “When you’re putting a show together, people come in with different levels of experience, and maybe some people have won awards or something that makes them stand out,” Bloys said. “But when you get into season two or three of a show and the show is a success, it is much harder to justify paying people wildly disparate numbers, and that’s where you have to make sure that you’re looking at the numbers—that they don’t end up just on the path they were on from the pilot stage. So, the thing that has been interesting about the whole movement is that it really is reminding everybody to do what’s right, and I think it’s re-training all of our thinking.”

It’s easy to feel like this is a little bit of an empty holiday, but thankfully, there are some meaningful changes being made to combat the pay disparity women face. At HBO, network execs were inspired by Big Little Lies star Reese Witherspoon’s involvement in the Time’s Up movement to examine all of their shows and correct any wage gaps that existed. That’s a pretty amazing move, so can other corporations start following suit, please?