Robin Wright channels Claire Underwood, fights for equal pay on 'House of Cards'

In the kind of power move that would make Claire Underwood proud, Robin Wright revealed on Tuesday that she insisted upon being paid the same amount as her male costar Kevin Spacey on Netflix's House of Cards.

“I was like, ‘I want to be paid the same as Kevin,’” Wright said at the Rockefeller Foundation's Insight Dialogues on May 17.

“I was looking at the statistics and Claire Underwood’s character was more popular than [Frank’s] for a period of time. So I capitalized on it. I was like, ‘You better pay me or I’m going to go public.' And they did.”

According to Business Insider, Spacey was already making at least $500,000 per episode of the show, compared to Wright's $420,000 (reported a year later, when Spacey was likely making more).

“It was the perfect paradigm," Wright said. "There are very few films or TV shows where the male, the patriarch, and the matriarch are equal. And they are in House of Cards.”

Hollywood's gaping gender-based wage disparities have been around for as long as the institution itself, but celebrities from Jennifer Lawrence to Kate Winslet are now coming forward to talk about it (or in Winslet's case, to talk about talking about it). Sarah Silverman also highlighted these financial discrepancies outside the entertainment industry, sung to the tune of the $30 million working women lose each year due to unequal salaries.

Maybe this is Claire Underwood's new platform.

Mashable reached out to Wright's representatives for comment, and will update this story.

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