Actress demands male Hollywood actors take pay cuts if they're serious about equality

Actress Salma Hayek said that male actors should be open to voluntarily accepting a pay cut if they're serious about evening the playing field in Hollywood's gender wage disparity.

What are the details?

Hayek, who has made claims to have been personally victimized by disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein, is leading the charge against Hollywood to change its policies with an eye toward evening out the industry's wage gap.

"It is not just the producers," Hayek said Sunday at a Women in Motion talk at the Cannes Film Festival. "It is actors, too."

Hayek — who has been a vocal supporter of the #MeToo and Time's Up movements — then called "time's up" on the entertainment industry's wage gap.

"Time's up. You had a good run but it is time now to be generous with the actresses," she added. "If actors ask such inflated fees it will leave nothing for actresses. If the movie's budget is $10 million, the [male] actor has to understand that if he is making $9.7 million, it is going to be hard for equality."

So hard, in fact, "otherwise they will kill the movie," Hayek quipped.

"I will be hated for saying this," she added. "I hope I can get another job."

Anything else?

British actor Benedict Cumberbatch had similar thoughts during an early May interview when he suggested nearly the same thing.

In a discussion with the Radio Times, Cumberbatch called on male actors to step up to the plate and refuse to take more money than what their female counterparts were being paid, even going as far as to reject work outright.

"Equal pay and a place at the table are the central tenets of feminism. Look at your quotas," Cumberbatch said. "Ask what women are paid, and say, 'If she's not paid the same as the men, I'm not doing it.'"

Cumberbatch, who has his own production company, said that he will use his platform to further pay parity for women in entertainment.

"I’m proud that [partner] Adam [Ackland] and I are the only men in our production company; our next project is a female story with a female lens about motherhood, in a time of environmental disaster," he said. "If it’s centered around my name, to get investors, then we can use that attention for a raft of female projects. Half the audience is female!"