Reese Witherspoon stood up for a colleague over a pay equality issue.

Reese Witherspoon

Reese Witherspoon

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."


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