Marc Blitstein

Taraji P. Henson asked for $500,000 to play Brad Pitt's mother. She got $150,000 and says about $30,000 of it was left. The movie made $335 million. In the video below, Gayle King asks if she's quitting acting. Taraji covers her face and cries before she can say a word. Then she does the math out loud. In 2008 she was third on the call sheet for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, behind Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Her 2016 memoir says she'd been promised "somewhere in the mid six figures." At a 2023 SAG-AFTRA event she said she asked for $500,000 and was first offered $100,000. It came up to $150,000 with a condition. She had to cover three months of New Orleans hotel bills herself. "Insult, meet injury," she wrote. On The Real she did the sum. Half the $150,000 went to taxes. Her team took 30% of the full fee, $45,000. That left $30,000, and her son's school tuition that year was $30,000. "Literally, for five months, that's what I made." The memoir puts her pay at less than 2% of what the studio paid the top name on that call sheet, Pitt. She got an Oscar nomination for the role. Fifteen years later she said she almost walked away from The Color Purple over pay. That same month she told Gayle King: "Every time I do something and I break another glass ceiling, when it's time to renegotiate, I'm at the bottom again." The case for the studio: Pitt sold the tickets, and she doesn't dispute his money. "They deserve to earn what they get," she said of Pitt and Blanchett. Her side: "I too worked my ass off, and at the time I couldn't say no. I didn't have any power." $335 million at the box office. An Oscar nomination. One year of school fees. Every day, one star's real paycheck. Was that Hollywood paying for box office power, or paying a Black woman less because it could?