Kangana Ranaut claims she's the only actress to get paid equal to male actors: Other A-listers do it for free

After all is said and done, there will always be Kangana Ranaut to add something more to a conversation. This is in reference to a recent chat on pay gap in Bollywood as Priyanka Chopra pointed out that she was never paid what a male actor in the same film was getting.

Taking an indirect dig at this, Kangana Ranaut was seen patting her own back as she said she is the only actress in Bollywood who has demanded and got equal pay. She said that it was difficult to begin with since the makers weren’t used to actresses demanding equal pay and what didn't help was that the female stars were ready to do roles for free, the same ones she was negotiating for.

Her Instagram story reads: “It’s true women before me simply submitted to these patriarchal norms. I was the first one to fight for pay parity and the most disgusting thing that I faced while doing this was that my contemporaries offered to work for free on the same roles that I was negotiating for. I can say with confidence most A-listers (women) do films for free along with offering other favours because they fear roles will go to the right people and then shrewdly release articles that they are the highest paid, haha…”

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The Manikarnika actressadded, “In the film industry, everyone knows that only I get paid like male actors and no one else and they have no one else to blame at least now.”

Priyanka Chopra in an interview with BBC last year revealed that she never got paid the same amount as her male co-actor with possibly the same amount of time on screen or less.

At the time, the Citadel actress said, “I have never had pay parity in Bollywood. I have done almost 60 movies there, but I have never got paid the same amount as my male co-actor. I would get paid about 10 per cent of my male co-actor. It (the pay gap) is substantially large and so many girls still deal with that.”

She also addressed issues like racism and white-skin obsession that the country has in context with her struggle and finding a foot in the entertainment business.

She said, “I did think that I was dark-skinned. I did think that I was not pretty enough. I did think that I would have to work a lot harder even though I was probably a little bit more talented than my co-actors who were lighter-skinned. I thought that was right because it was so normalised. I think, as I grew up, I saw things in my career that I didn’t even know were right or wrong and I had to be educated and learn along the way,” she added.

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