Hilary Swank spoke out about the state of sexism in today’s film industry, saying Hollywood still favours men over women.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Swank was speaking at the Loyola Marymount University School of Film and TV and was emphasizing just how much more her male co-stars will get paid than her.
“Ten times more than me – 10 times,”; said the two-time Academy Award-winning actress. “Not double, but 10 times for the same job. We only have this much left for the female actress. I mean, there’s two genders on this earth. Both are compelling, interesting, diverse, wonderful in all their own separate ways. And yet there’s an influx of male roles and there’s just not for women.”;
Swank referenced her pivotal role as a transgender teenager in Boy’s Don’t Cry, in which she says she got paid only $75 a day. She also mentioned the extreme physical demands that she had to adapt to in order to play a female boxer in Million Dollar Baby.
“I had to eat 210 grams of protein a day. I don’t know if you guys are aware of intake of protein… I had to eat 60 egg whites in a day and I couldn’t,” she reveals. “So every morning I would drink them. I had to eat every hour and a half. So in the night, I had to wake up and drink protein shakes. I put on 23 pounds of muscle.”;
In addition, Swank discussed her new Western drama, The Homesman, which she says is a “feminist movie.”;
“It’s about the objectification and trivialization of women and it takes place in the mid 1800s,” she says. “But us women know exactly what that feels like right now in 2014 – talking about gay, lesbian, transgender issues and how far they’ve come… yet how far we still need to go.”;