Jessica Chastain has praised her IT Chapter Two co-star James Mcavoy for championing equal pay, long before it was “a cool thing to do”.
The 42-year-old actress is a vocal campaigner for gender equality, and told OK! magazine the Scottish star has always shared her views too.
“I’m going to say something nice about James McAvoy here. Before the #MeToo movement, before Time’s Up, before anything like that, James was always a proponent of equal pay,” Chastain noted.
“Even when we did The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby (in 2013), he and I were doing the same amount of work, the same everything, and we got equal pay for that movie.
“He’s always been a proponent of that. He’s posted about it on his Instagram before it was the cool thing to do,” she added.
Jessica also described her Dark Phoenix co-star as an “incredible human being”, and confessed the support of her fellow actors has made gender parity less of a “taboo” subject in Hollywood.
“For the longest time women were afraid to say they were feminists. It was a dirty word to say. If you said you were a feminist, people would look at you like there was something wrong with you,” she continued. “I love the fact that I now see lots of young women coming out and saying it – and there’s no problem with it. They are able to express themselves in a more equal manner now. That gives me a lot of hope.”
IT Chapter Two is in cinemas now.
