Screen legend Sharon Stone has taken on the gender pay gap in Hollywood again, posting a clip from her 1995 film Casino on her Instagram story noting the costume she’s wearing, with the caption: “Just in case I die one day and my kids notice I never got equal pay and want to auction them.”
The video was originally posted by @robert_de_niro_offical, a fan page dedicated to Robert De Niro which had the following caption:
“The costume budget for the film Casino was $1 million. De Niro had 70 different costumes throughout the film. Sharon Stone had 40. They both were allowed to keep their costumes afterwards.”
But Stone has revealed in the past that she’d only kept one costume from the film.
In 2020, in an interview with Vogue, Stone said: “The only thing I took was a Pucci jacket—the one that Ginger dies in, ironically,” referring to her character in the film, which was directed by Martin Scorsese.
Earlier this year, the 64-year actor was vocal about the gender pay inequality in the film industry, this time – speaking to InStyle magazine about another classic film she starred in; the 1992 erotic thriller, Basic Instinct.
As with Casino, Stone had apparently been allowed to keep all the costumes from the film.
“I couldn’t believe how exciting it was and all of the incredible costumes that were being made just for me,” she said. “I put in my contract that I could keep the clothes,” she wrote.
“People thought I was crazy, but the truth is I wasn’t getting paid much compared to my male costar. I made $500,000; Michael [Douglas] made $14 million. So keeping my costumes was a really smart thing to do.”
Hollywood’s wage gap is a topic Stone has discussed publicly on a number of occasions.
In 2015, she told People, “After Basic Instinct, no one wanted to pay me.”
“I remember sitting in my kitchen with my manager and just crying and saying I’m not going to work until I get paid,” she said. “I still got paid so much less than any men.”
Stone is adamant that change “has to start with regular pay, not just for movie stars, but regular pay for the regular woman in the regular job.”
“I waited tables and scrubbed floors and everything else on the way up, and you must make the same, and it’s not cool that you don’t.”
“More than 50 per cent of marriages end in divorce and the women are working and taking care of their kids and that’s how it goes and you have to say ‘Yes’ because you have to feed your children,” she continued. “It’s a sort of economic blackmail.”
Stone is not alone in calling out Hollywood’s problematic gender wage gap. In the past, actors including Natalie Portman, Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Stone and Charlize Theron have revealed they were paid less than the male actors who shared the screen.