After applauding Jennifer Lawrence's essay about wage disparity between men and women in Hollywood that she wrote for Lena Dunham's newsletter Lenny, Bradley Cooper says he wants to begin teaming up with his female costars to negotiate salaries before any film he's interested in doing goes into production.
"I don't know where it's changing otherwise," Cooper told Reuters of the Hollywood gender pay gap. "But that's something that I could do."
Cooper and Lawrence have starred together in numerous films, but following the Sony hack it was reveled that for their last film, "American Hustle," Cooper was able to negotiate a higher salary than Lawrence was.
"This could be a young-person thing. It could be a personality thing. I'm sure it's both. But ... based on the statistics, I don't think I'm the only woman with this issue," Lawrence wrote in her essay. "Are we socially conditioned to behave this way? ... Could there still be a lingering habit of trying to express our opinions in a certain way that doesn't 'offend' or 'scare' men?"
Lawrence said in her essay that the emails that surfaced thanks to the Sony hack made her realize how less she gets paid than her male costars.
Cooper told Reuters that he was shocked to learn what he and Lawrence's "American Hustle" costar Amy Adams earned for the film. He called it "embarrassing" and noted that she got paid "nothing."
So Cooper believes the only way to end the gender pay gap is for he and his peers to start a dialogue.
"Usually you don't talk about the financial stuff, you have people," he told Reuters. "But you know what? It's time to start doing that."
