House of Cards' Robin Wright had to push for equal pay as Kevin Spacey

'I was like: ‘You’d better pay me or I’m going to go public.’ And they did'

House of Cards is notable for having two incredibly complicated, enduring and manipulative lead characters: Francis and Claire Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, respectively.

On screen, the pair shared a wonderful chemistry, both standing their ground in the face of adversity and, in the latest season at least, both trying to get the upper hand on each other.

It would be difficult to argue one Underwood is more important to the story than the other: something the studio seemingly didn’t understand at first.

“It was the perfect paradigm. There are very few films or TV shows where the male, the patriarch, and the matriarch are equal. And they are in House of Cards,” Wright told an audience at the Rockefeller Centre in New York according to the Huffington Post.

Unfortunately, although Wright and Spacey ultimately share the lead, the studio didn’t want to pay the female actor the same as her male counterpart.

“I was like: ‘I want to be paid the same as Kevin,’” she continued. “I was looking at the statistics and Claire Underwood’s character was more popular than [Frank’s] for a period of time. So I capitalised on it.

“I was like: ‘You’d better pay me or I’m going to go public.’ And they did”

Both actors have appeared in all 52 episodes. Not only that but on several occasions they have directed individual episodes, with both listed as executive directors throughout the show’s fifth season.

Wright added how having children had affected how much pay she was able to command: “Because I wasn’t working full-time, I wasn’t building my salary bracket. If you don’t build that ... with notoriety and presence, you’re not in the game anymore. You become a B-list actor. You’re not box office material.

“You don’t hold the value you would have held if you had done four movies a year like Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett did during the time I was raising my kids. Now I’m kind of on a comeback at 50 years old.”

Others to speak out about Hollywood's gender pay gap include Jennifer Lawrence, who criticised the industry in an open letter.