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Not Even Winning An Oscar Could Save Patricia Arquette From Pay Inequality

Winning an Oscar may have upped Patricia Arquette’s prestige factor, but it didn’t give her any additional bargaining power when it came to negotiating a back-end deal with a film executive recently.

Arquette described facing the gendered situation in a conversation with HuffPost Live on Thursday:

I’ve walked away from jobs — I walked away from one after the Oscar. It was another art movie, and we weren’t getting paid really much up-front. The idea was if this movie’s a success … we’ll all make some money. … But when I asked for the same pay structure on the back-end as the male — not the same amount, even, because he was in more of the movie — the same structure, they didn’t want to give it to me.

It wasn’t hard for Arquette to pass up the acting opportunity once the sexist double-standard came to light.

“[It] was like, ‘Oh, I get it– you don’t want to pay me anything up-front, and if your movie makes a bunch of money, you don’t want to pay me either,'” she recounted. “[It made me feel like] no, I actually don’t believe in this artistic project with you anymore. I don’t want to work with you.”

Watch more from Patricia Arquette’s HuffPost Live conversation here.

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