Olivia Colman is right that an ‘Oliver Colman’ would be paid more – but to a point

Nobody particularly likes movie stars talking about their salaries. It’s all a bit gauche, isn’t it? A bit, as Chandler Bing would say, “my wallet’s too small for my fifties and my diamond shoes are too tight”. For nothing inflames the commentariat faster than a rich celebrity talking about being paid – even if the celebrity in question is Olivia Colman. But she has made a good point about who in Hollywood gets paid what.

This weekend, the Oscar winner told CNN that “if I was Oliver Colman, I’d be earning a f*** of a lot more than I am”, adding: “I know of one pay disparity which is a 12,000 per cent difference. Do the maths.”

The idea of a better remunerated “Oliver Colman” has understandably earned the most attention when it comes to Colman’s comments, and may very well be accurate – but it’s also the least interesting of her thoughts on pay equality in Hollywood. Instead, her other comments about the slightly opaque justification for who earns what are more revealing – and reflect an industry that doesn’t quite know what it’s doing but still pretends as if it does. Colman said that the industry defends paying men more by claiming “they draw in the audiences” – “[but] that hasn’t been true for decades,” she continued. “They still like to use that as a reason to not pay women as much.” It’s an old-fashioned explanation, and completely at odds with an increasingly erratic industry.

Pay equality in Hollywood is a complicated idea. Unlike the real world, where the pay gap is undeniable – last year it was reported to be widening even further, to 14.4 per cent between the average male and female salaries – the film world is such a hyper-specific bubble of opportunities and decision-making that it’s harder to equate the same language to it. It’s partly why salaries have been ripe for exploitation – stardom and worth are so ephemeral in a famous actor context that it’s often a fool’s errand to try and find some kind of consistency in it.

It used to be that box office revenue determines an actor’s worth. When Jennifer Lawrence earned $20m (£15m) to Chris Pratt’s $13m (£10m) for the 2016 sci-fi film Passengers, they were at very different stages of their careers: Lawrence was coming off the blockbuster Hunger Games franchise, plus an Oscar win and a series of hit films including Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. Pratt was famous for the TV show Parks and Recreation and for leading a single movie: 2015’s Jurassic World. “If the next few movies don’t do well in the box office, I won’t get paid the same,” Lawrence said in 2018. “That’s the way it works. If you can’t prove that you deserve that number, then you’re not gonna get it. It’s very fickle. I don’t want to sound like I’m on a high horse, because I might be on a tiny little Shetland pony in a month.”

By 2021, and on the heels of two underperforming star vehicles (2017’s Mother! and 2018’s Red Sparrow), she was earning less than Leonardo DiCaprio for their Netflix comedy Don’t Look Up – $30m to $25m – despite receiving top billing in the film. But Lawrence understood why they were not paid equally: “Look, Leo brings in more box office than I do,” she told Vanity Fair. “I’m extremely fortunate and happy with my deal.”

As much as Lawrence’s logic makes a certain kind of sense, though, it’s also quite easy to poke holes in it. Hollywood, after all, is an industry built on assumptions, with absolutely no one able to predict or assess which stars really put bums on seats. Let’s think about Dune: Part Two, for instance. An unverified report claimed Timothée Chalamet earned $3m for his role in the film, while Zendaya earned $2m. But was it turned into a $574m and counting hit by Chalamet, an actor very much being shaped into a young DiCaprio when it comes to stardom? Or was it Zendaya who was the biggest pull, thanks to her wielding of substantial social media power and the high-profile magazine covers and press attention she garners via her consistently stunning red carpet looks? Or is it Dune itself – a piece of intellectual property that has its own major appeal?

You can apply this line of questioning constantly. If Sydney Sweeney catapulted the sleeper hit romcom Anyone But You to grossing more than $200m (£158m) worldwide, then why couldn’t she do the same for Marvel flop Madame Web less than two months later? Tom Holland has never sold a hit film on his own name that wasn’t a comic book adaptation or a film based on a blockbuster video game – is he therefore not a real movie star? Musical biopics such as Bohemian Rhapsody and Bob Marley: One Love have been massive hits – but does that mean Rami Malek and Kingsley Ben-Adir, respectively, will be audience draws next time they lead a movie?

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See what I mean? It’s all sort of meaningless, and absolutely no one knows the truth any more. Without wishing to sound like a corporate stooge, it’s hard to see how a Hollywood studio can fairly compensate its stars when it’s impossible to figure out who is really “earning” what.

Instead, much of Hollywood’s bookkeeping is propped up by buzz – agents who make a convincing enough argument that their client is worth a particular amount, that their clients are stars with a capital “s”, that… “Trust me, this newest film will be a smash and justify all the millions you’re paying them.”

The opportunity to get into that space is, of course, trickier, with Hollywood always favouring the young, white and conventionally beautiful despite claiming to be a progressive industry. Likewise, white men tend to get more chances to fail. Adam Sandler had a run of flops in the early 2010s, among them Blended, That’s My Boy and Pixels. Yet he’s still making absolute bank from his deal with Netflix, which coincidentally led him to be named recently as the highest-paid actor of 2023. Margot Robbie and, somewhat unexpectedly, Jennifer Aniston were the only two women in the top 10, it should be noted – with the bulk of Aniston’s earnings coming not from films but television and endorsement deals. That says a lot in itself.

Colman is right that she should likely be paid more, particularly when she’s selling films like Wicked Little Letters – currently the highest-grossing post-Covid British comedy at the UK box office – basically on her name alone. But it’s impossible to create a completely equal playing field in an industry driven so much by speculation and schmoozing. It’ll take far more than breaking a glass ceiling. If anything, it’ll take a major razing to the ground.